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When designating TVDB as my episode sorting, Plex is creating duplicate episodes and not conforming with the data from TVDB. When designating TMDB as the episode sorting, the problem goes away. Not sure if I’m explaining the issue sufficiently, so let me know if I can provide any further information. Thanks.
Maybe a screenshot will help… and a sample of the file names in such a set of duplicates (e.g. from edit > info)
Attached below are screenshots of How It’s Made (2001) Season 14 (link for verification). With the TVDB ordering, it seems to skip the actual E2 (Mini GP Motorcycles; Fig Cookies; Tool Boxes; Pipe Bends) and instead marks E3 (Western Revolver Replicas; Arc Trainers; Used-Oil Furnaces; Vegetable Peelers; Pizza Cutters) as E2 metadata.
Further, it duplicates the E6 (Surfboards; Stickers; Sandwich Cookies; Concrete Roofing Tiles) metadata onto both E5 and E6.
Files names are structured as so:
This has happened in multiple seasons and in different shows, including Unwrapped (2001) and Oswald (2001).
I’ll confirm I see this behavior with test files I just made. My library default is the Plex Agent so it defaults to TMDB and matches them correctly. When I switch to TVDB (aired), they get messed up.
Did you Refresh Metadata of the whole show after switching the ordering?
In some cases, it might also be necessary to refresh the web app in your browser, to ensure that it doesn’t show improperly cached data.
Doing a Refresh Metadata did not correct the problem. Doing the “Plex Dance” seems to correct things. Verified that TVDB ordering was maintained after moving the “How Its Made” folder was moved back into the TV Library. Created a couple new test episodes and they matched ok.
Unfortunately the Plex Dance did not work for me. I also just noticed that the episode descriptions are correct, only the episode titles seems broken (see pictures above). Not sure what this means.
Do all your files use the mkv container?
Or are there also mp4 files among them?
All .mkv
I might have an idea: TMDB allows to create links/“external IDs” not only for the main show, but also for each individual episode.
S14E05 on TMDB for instance is currently linked to S14E04 on IMDb
The same mistake is also present on TheTVDB.
This can mess with Plex’s unified metadata database.
Interesting. Upon looking at the IMDb page for another affected show, Oswald (2001), it seems the erroneous order is coming from whatever episode ordering IMDb has in place. In this case, Oswald S01E12, which should be scraped as “I Guess You Never Know,” is instead being scraped as “A Day at the Beach.”
If what you are saying is indeed the root of the issue, is there anything I can do to correct the issue?
Not in this case. No matter which numbering IMDb has in place, the episodes on TVDB and TMDB are linking to the wrong episode (title + description) on IMDb.
Correct the wrong link from TVDB to IMDb, as well as from TMDB to IMDb. For each episode which is wrongly linked.
Ok, so you’re saying the error is stemming from TheTVDB and TMDB linking to the wrong episode on IMDb, yet TMDB still scrapes correctly and TheTVDB does not.
Just to clarify, when you refer to the link between TheTVDB and IMDb, are you referring to the link under “ON OTHER SITES” on the TheTVDB episode page? If so, although the episode ordering is different, the link goes to the correct episode title+description. Using your example above S14E05 on TheTVDB and S14E04 on IMDb, both are the episode “Sails; Walnuts; Wheel Immobilizers; Honeycomb Structural Panels.”
Indeed, it seems TheTVDB order is correct and the IMDb order is disorganized (e.g., incomplete air dates). I’m not sure why Plex is relying on any influence from IMDb anyway when I am using TheTVDB for my episode ordering.
On a side note, by just going to plex.tv and browsing How Its Made without being signed in, the error seems to be present.
I have filed an error report with the metadata team to get this looked at.
Thank you!
Checking in to say the issue has not been resolved.
Following what @dokuro instructed in a previous thread, I’ve added external IDs for How Its Made Season 14 and Oswald Season 1 on TMDB. I will check again in 3-5 days to see if Plex adopted the changes.
Regarding oswald, I took a look at the show and noticed a large number of episode didn’t have any summaries on either tmdb or tvdb so I went ahead and added them on tmdb using the summaries from List of episodes | Oswald Wiki | Fandom. Feel free to adjust these yourself if they feel off.
With your additions of the external ids it should help fill out the show better on plex https://watch.plex.tv/en-GB/show/oswald/season/1, especially using tvdb ordering.
Update. Oswald is scraping correctly! How its Made Season 14 is not 
I will continue to monitor and will update with any changes.
It’s looking okay here https://watch.plex.tv/en-GB/show/how-its-made/season/14 so might be a cloudflare caching thing at your location. Give it another day or so …
EDIT: Nevermind, I see it’s not right on watch.plex.tv so might need a bit longer to get to the plex backend.
