Server Version#: 1.20.1.3252
Player Version#: 4.42.1
Rating provider is IMDB
Using modern Movie (non legacy) agent.
ALL movies have an IMDB Rating when listed through the web gui.
I am using Plex on the latest web gui and decides to sort my movies on “Rating” (i.e. in my case IMDB rating) and noticed that most were just listed in alphabetical order. A small % were listed correctly in Rating order.
When I investigated further I noticed that if I EDITED any of those that were listed in alphabetical order, the Rating field was empty/null even though they showed an IMDB rating when listed. Those that listed correctly in Rating order did have an entry for Rating when edited and it was a protected entry (yellow).
When I opened up SQL Browser and viewed the “metadata_items” for the Plex db I noticed that those movies that showed no entry for rating when edited had no entry in the “rating” field for their record, but did have an entry for “audience_rating”. This later field appears to be the one which is displayed when viewing (not editing) the movie entry in Plex.
I next looked at the record for a movie that did have an entry for Rating when edited and these did have an entry in the “rating” field AND the “audience_rating” field in their db record.
So there appears to be 2 issues here - 1. the sorting on Rating field and 2. The fact that the rating is not shown when editing the movies. This all seems to be because different parts of the web gui are referencing 2 different fields in the database.
Currently I do not know if this problem exists in other Plex players - although a quick look at 1.18 of Plex for Windows indicates that it does in that (not surprising as shares a lot of code with the web gui I imagine)
There is a clash of old vs. new here.
Historically, there was only one ‘Rating’. This the one you see in the ‘Edit’ dialog.
Then support for Rottentomatoes was added. Now you suddenly had 2 values: one rating based on reviews by professional movie critics and one based on regular people.
Only recently, these 2 values were sorted into two different columns in Plex: “Critic Rating” and “Audience Rating”.
IMDb provides an Audience rating. It is regular people who are rating movies on there. Therefore you must use the “Audience Rating” sorting in Plex Web.
All that’s left is to add both of these “Rating” fields to the Edit dialog.
Interesting and thanks for the explantion.
It is a bit of a muddle between these two at the moment. When I list movies through the web gui (table list) and I show the Critic Rating column it is actually appears to be a combination of the “user” rating and “critic” rating fields and does not sort at all if pulling the field from the user_rating field (because the critic field is blank). There should be 2 columns here now.
Hopefully this will all be cleaned up.
Only RottenTomatoes delivers a Critic Rating. Therefore this field will only populate when you select RT in the properties of your library as the Rating Source.
Just got word that both ratings field are going to be non-editable.
If you have edited them in your library, so that this field is now “locked”, you might want to unlock that field now. Otherwise, this rating may never update in the future.
There is a way to do that for a whole library at once, but it requires a way to send http requests. On Linux you can use curl (but there is also a Windows version of curl available.)
This approach is already described in this thread New Music Metadata handling
The request is looking like this
curl -X PUT "me.local:32400/library/sections/NN/all?type=1&rating.locked=0&X-Plex-Token=XXXXX
Thanks for this info.
Actually I unlocked the field through the GUI (as part of a test and there were only about about 50 movies) and then nulled this one field using SQLBrowser (with PMS shutdown). Naughty I know but was fairly happy it was safe.
So now all movies behave consistently.
Just to re-iterate they need to fix the movie list view (as you say the grid view is OK) to add the Audience Rating as a available field so you can then sort on it. At the moment it shows the Critic Rating field which actually displays the Audience Rating and does not sort properly.
Thanks for the reminder. I have missed the hint about the list mode before. And I can confirm that this only has the critic rating and the personal ‘star’ rating currently.
