In the Watchlist RSS feed, mine or that of my users, the upcoming show, “Alien: Earth” is listed with the wrong tvdb id: “393223”. This is the initial ID of the show which was later replaced by the current one: “458912”. It’s not happening just with the feeds relative to my server/account but with others as well. I believe the issue is a little more centralised and it may originate in the plex.tv database. Any idea how to sort this one?
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Will anyone in charge respond to this?
Thanks
Having the same issue over here. Plex isn’t working for some shows. That forum post has now included your initial post here to keep building evidence.
I have created an error report for Alien: Earth to get it looked at.
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FYI… the show has duplicate ids for tvdb within plex. This is the unfortunate situation where the show changes and then plex fails do cleanup on its back-end …
Alien: Earth (2025)
plex://show/66391fb2895fabeb264433d1
imdb://tt13623632
tmdb://157239
tvdb://393223
tvdb://458912
This is now the 5th show on my server with this problem …
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So what is the correct way to add the correct series with the correct metadata or can it be done right now?
Did some troubleshooting, and I think the issue is similar to one I had with another new show. There’s two TVDB GUID entries in the XML for the show.
Plex GUID: GUID plex://show/66391fb2895fabeb264433d1
<Guid id="imdb://tt13623632"/>
<Guid id="tmdb://157239"/>
<Guid id="tvdb://393223"/>
<Guid id="tvdb://458912"/>
458912 appears to be the correct ID: Alien: Earth - TheTVDB.com
Moderator Edit: Consolidating threads on the same topic. @FordGuy61
That’s really interesting.
Is there any way to fix this ourselves?
Moderator Edit: Consolidating threads on the same topic. @FordGuy61
Your only option currently is to use the Episode ordering of TheMovieDB for this show.
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How would we go about doing that?
In your Plex instance, edit the show, go to “Advanced” and change “Episode ordering” to “The Movie Database (Aired)”
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Thanks, it worked!
Is there a way to fix the root cause / problem instead of using the episode ordering workaround?
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Why is this show not having TVDB as an option? It exists on TVDB, so it seems to be a Plex-specific issue.
Changing this in advanced settings doesn’t work for everyone. -__- I have show title, poster, and show description but zero episode info. The show doesn’t even show up when attempting to fix the match.
EDIT: I Unmatched it to try again fresh and clearly screwed myself. Indeed, nothing is returned at all from the agent when working on Alien: Earth.
EDIT 2: Removed and re-added the show at the filesystem level. Still completely hosed. There’s no way to match it.
The plex team are unbelievably stubborn when this happens. They know they have a major problem when their metadata back-end gets messed up with multiple ids and they seem unwilling fix it. As I said previously in this thread I’ve now 5 shows with this problem.
The only workaround for this specific show is to match and use tmdb episode ordering, tvdb WILL NOT WORK until plex manually clean it up.
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I wish it was that easy! For me, completely re-adding the show fresh, I’m not even provided the setting in Advanced to set episode ordering as it hasn’t matched at all. 
Use the matching id to get it to auto match correctly, like this …Alien: Earth (2025) {tmdb-157239}/Season 01/Alien: Earth - S01E01 - Neverland.mp4 … and then ensure the show level episode ordering is set to tmdb. Make sure to do a full plex dance.
BTW… you will notice within this episode ordering drop down that only tmdb is listed, thats because tvdb is completely broken for this show which is why its blank with no metadata for anyone who is using tvdb as the default library setting.
Anyhow, doing the above works perfectly for me …
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FYI for anyone monitoring this thread…
plex team have removed the duplicate ids for this show and I see TVDB now listed as an option for episode ordering.
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Awesome - just reverted my episode ordering to library default.
