I’ve been having issues with this show for a while as per the discussion in https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/230450/metadata-fetching-issues-have-come-back/ with having to manually refresh the metadata daily in order to get the metadata to appear. Now, as of the start of Season 2, even manually refreshing has stopped working. As you can see below, it is adding the new episodes to the top of Season 1 without any metadata.
The episodes are named by date. For example: F:\TV\The Late Show with Stephen Colbert\Season 02\The Late Show with Stephen Colbert - 2016-09-06 - Harry Connick Jr., Ava DuVernay, Grouplove.mkv
I still haven’t had time to do that yet, though I will soon. However, it should be noted that the problem affects multiple shows. There are 2 separate issues:
A bunch of shows (all of them fairly long running) don’t get metadata added automatically when new episodes of the shows get added to the database. It happens fairly randomly (one episode will work but the next one will have a problem). It seems to affect Whose Line is it Anyway, NCIS, NCIS Los Angeles and I think a couple of other shows I’m not remembering right now. New episodes will show up without metadata and if I hit refresh on the episode, no new metadata will be downloaded. If I hit refresh on the entire Series and not the specific episode, it downloads metadata for the episode and everything works. But the next episode added won’t have metadata until I manually refresh again.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert does the same thing but manually refreshing the series doesn’t cause the metadata to download for any episode in Season 2. The metadata downloads successfully for any episode in Season 1.
I made time to do the Plex Dance. It looks like the Plex Dance solved it for this one show. I’ll have to see when a new episode shows up for one of the other shows if they are fixed as well. If not, I’ll Plex Dance them too.
Correction: It successfully downloaded all of the metadata for the show immediately after the Plex Dance but the next episode that was added to the library once again has no metadata. The only difference is that it is now listed as S2 E0 in the iOS app
@BigWheel said:
sorry for the late reply. looks like it might not be updating the http cache for thetvdb when new episodes added and was/is using old bad data.
I’ll get to this shortly and see if it fixes it. The part I’m confused about is that when a new episode shows up, it fails to get the metadata but when I do the Plex dance, it succeeds in updating the metadata. Is there a difference in the way it gets metadata when a new show is added vs when a new episode is added?
Am I understanding correctly that when a new show is added, it downloads all of the metadata for the show and puts it in the HTTP cache and from that point onward it attempts to update the HTTP cache each time a new episode is found and then uses the cache in order to update the individual episode? Then the problem I’m running into is that the HTTP cache fails to update and then when it searches the cache for metadata, it finds none?
If that’s the case, there really seems to be a bug with updating the HTTP cache in Plex. I ran into this same problem affecting 5-10 shows in my library and a couple of months ago I bought an entirely new server, new installation of Windows and of Plex and it corrected it. The problem started coming back a couple of weeks later, however.
Here are the logs from after I deleted the cache and then refreshed first an episode of Ultimate Spider-Man (the newest one that didn’t get any metadata) then an episode of The Late Show. Then I refreshed the whole series for Ultimate Spider-Man, that caused the episode to update properly.
From my reading of the logs, it seems that when you refresh an individual episode, it just says “Nothing has changed” and doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t appear to check the internet to see if there is new metadata at all. It seems to check the cache, notice that the cache hasn’t changed and then immediately stops. It seems like the next step would be to check if the cache is out of date since a refresh button has been pressed and attempt to update it. But I don’t see an attempt being made.
After I created the logs I did a refresh on the entire Late Show series and all of the episodes were updated properly. We will see if new episodes get added properly from now on.
So, I’m back to my original problem which is that the metadata doesn’t appear to the Late Show with Stephen Colbert when a new file gets added but if I hit refresh on the entire series then the metadata downloads for the missing episode. Only the next episode doesn’t get metadata and I have to repeat the process.
So, anyone have any insight? It appears at least 2 of us are having this problem. Is this a bug that needs to be fixed in the server? Is a fix in the works?
By the 19th you said you were back to the original problem - so can you answer the following questions about what happens:
Let’s say new episodes of Colbert get added two days in a row - when the second episode gets added on day two, will the previous day’s episode then get metadata w/o manual intervention?
If you clear the HTTP cache do things always start working again?
@maxflix said: @Zamrod - Can you help me clarify your scenario?
By the 19th you said you were back to the original problem - so can you answer the following questions about what happens:
Let’s say new episodes of Colbert get added two days in a row - when the second episode gets added on day two, will the previous day’s episode then get metadata w/o manual intervention?
If you clear the HTTP cache do things always start working again?
None of them will ever get metadata without intervention. I’ve let it go almost 2 weeks. All new episodes don’t have metadata. They all get refreshed if I refresh the show(once again, only if I press the refresh button on the show. It doesn’t work if I use the refresh button on the season or the individual episode).
I haven’t cleared the HTTP cache yet. Though I will try it now and see what happens. However, I had the problem on my old server and I bought brand new hardware and reinstalled windows and Plex from scratch. It was working fine for about 2 weeks on the new server and I figured there might have just been something wrong with Windows on the other computer that stopped it from working. But after about 2 weeks, random shows started having issues getting metadata from time to time (though most of them are long running, it seems shows with less than 3 seasons are unaffected). At the moment the problem only seems to consistently happen with The Late Show and Whose Line is it Anyway(both shows with 200+ episodes). Though the most recent episode of Agents of Shield didn’t get metadata either.
Although, now that I think of it, I did clear the HTTP cache as part of doing the Plex Shuffle (assuming the only cache you need to clear is the thetvdb one). It didn’t fix the problem. It enabled the refresh to download metadata again, but still didn’t fix the problem with files not getting metadata without a refresh.
