Saw the little annoying orange alert had turned into a danger red in my notifications, and I have been having a low-level panic attack about it ever since. I’ve been using TVDB for ages and still prefer it for all my agent needs. I know not everybody digs TVDB, but I’ve been contributing to that database for over a decade myself personally and I am not keen to abandon it, so I really don’t like being forced/threatened into it.
I don’t know how hard it could possibly be to just let people have the things they like, and don’t understand why any company would spend this much time and effort to take features away from people so they can replace them with (in my experiences) vastly inferior ones. Especially when they’re features you have to actually dig into the guts of the system to even turn on in the first place. People that are still using their preferred agents are doing so for A REASON.
That said, I can see the writing on the wall and know that I’m not going to get my way, so I tried creating a duplicate library for my content to let Plex’s “newer, faster, and more accurate” agent have a go at it, and the results were so incredibly, phenomenally, terrifyingly incorrect that I had to go have a little lie down.
Things I observed:
Even though all my shows are broken out into individual folders, seasons, and named exactly like the guide says they should be named, Plex’s agent just ignored everything and set them the way it thought was correct.
Some shows were merged together, causing multiple files to be listed under each “episode” as different versions of the shows.
Other shows were split apart for no apparent reason.
The rules for which shows were merged and which shows were split seem to be entirely random - I can see some of the info is coming from TMDB (Plex’s thumbnails and text blurbs are a 1:1 match) but others are just baffling.
Several shows were just… missing seasons. They don’t exist anymore. With other agents, the shows would at least still show up (just with no information), whereas Plex’s agent seemed to just… get rid of them. That, or it hid them away as files under some unrelated show.
When it was incorrect (which was a majority of the time), there’s no “Fix Match” or anything like that where you can try and fine-tune the match results.
Plex’s parser does not know how to handle a lot of anime or tokusatsu, especially if it’s not Mainstream.
I said it before, I’ll say it again - I don’t know how hard it could possibly be to just let people have the things they like.
I can give specific examples if you want, but I can’t believe you don’t already know all the things I’m talking about.
Please do share.
The „new“ agent tends to be more strict. Many users who ran into problems did so because their file organization/naming was far off the official naming schema. You stated you stick to the schema… so I’m curious what might be causing this.
Most of the time it seems to be fairly accurate.
Keep in mind that when upgrading the library, Plex should consider/maintain existing matches — so that experience will be different from starting a library from scratch.
If you are creating a new library for the purpose of comparing it with the legacy agent for TheTVDB, the first thing you should do (even before adding media), is to set the “episode ordering” of the whole library to “TheTVDB (Aired)”.
This kind of “match hinting” was only available in the “Fix Match” dialog with the old agent. If you remember having to do that a lot in the past, you will have to add these ID numbers a lot again. Only this time you can do it before adding the media into your library, and it will stick around.
I tend to agree with this post. I am using Ubuntu has the server, but the new agents seem to be missing a lot of movie posters. I am constantly having to revert back to the legacy and The Movie Database Agents in order to find the needed artwork. The Last Tango in Paris and Cool Hand Luke are ones that happened yesterday…the “new and improved” agent just doesn’t work as well as the previous agents. This has been a problem since the “new” agent came out.
I tried changing the episode ordering as @OttoKerner suggested and it does appear to have smoothed down some of the rougher edges, but there’s still a lot of weird things going on here that I just do not understand.
So three series, all of which had somewhat similar releases and had very different problems. All three were anthology series, which complicates their processing:
The New Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Series - anthology series consisted of Wally Gator, Lippy the Lion, and Touche Turtle cartoons. I have each of these in their own folder consistent with the TVDB naming convention. Wally Gator and Lippy the Lion were recognized and assigned their correct info, but Touche Turtle lost his individual entry and was put (incorrectly) as just the anthology series, meaning that the new agent has all the episode info wrong. It did a similar thing with Yogi and Huckleberry Hound’s shows, wanting to treat them like the anthology show and not the individual segments, forcefully merging Snaglepuss and others back into the “primary” show and causing multiple shows to have multiple different video files assigned for each episode.
The Bullwinkle Show - similar setup, anthology show with lots of smaller shows inside it. Peabody and Sherman have their own show entry for TVDB, and the new agent also accepts that as a different show, didn’t try to force merge this show like it did the HB cartoons. I do not know what the difference is, they are organized exactly the same way.
King Leonardo and His Short Subjects - another anthology show, less common, composed of the shorts King and Odie, Tooter Turtle, and The Hunter. TVDB has all of these listed as individual shows. The new agent has no idea what “King Leonardo and His Short Subjects” was, but did recognize the some individual shows within. No attempt at the forced integration. Also, the shows have no information in them - King and Odie only has the name of the first episode, Tooter Turtle has no episode titles or summaries, and The Hunter is just completely missing - I’m guessing it’s been added under a different show somewhere, but I could not find it.
In addition, Ultraman, Super Sentai, and Kamen Rider are all in single folders broken out by season/sub-series in my folder hierarchy. Some seasons of the show are now showing up as their own individual entries, while others are still under the omnibus master series. It’s very weird. There’s a lot of other shows to also pour through, so I can keep finding loose threads to pluck at if you want.
