Ok, so I made some progress. In a strange way:
By editing my .XML file, here are the observations I made. These could be incorrect or incomplete, as I literally don’t have any more data to run through PLEX. I might make some up in a different time, but a more comprehensive way of understanding how PLEX parses data would be good to have.
- EVERYTHING that doesn’t have a “episode-num” tag will be identified as a Movie, no matter the categories.
- EVERYTHING that does have a “episode-num” tag, be it a “original-air-date” type or a “xmltv_ns” type will be identified as a series AND THEN will be categorized under News or Sports following custom categories under DVR settings.
I came to this conclusion by configuring a XMLTV parser program that would scrape a website and fill in Season/Episode information when available, will add a “original-air-date” with a fixed year (2019, in this case) when no episode information is available (which will add an “episode-num” tag to Movies) and, after that, will delete any “episode-num” tag on entries that are identified either as “Movie” of “Cinema” in the categories (that’s how movies are categorized in my country, at least with this sample size).
In this scenario, only entries with no “episode-num” tag are listed under Movies, only “News” and “Sports” (that follow the custom categories on the DVR setting, including different languages) show up on those categories and EVERYTHING that doesn’t fall in either of those will show up on “Shows”.
I only noticed two downsides at this point:
Multiple screenings of a show that you don’t have enough information about (lets say you know “Miami Vice” is broadcasted every day at 15:00) will only show once on the “show” or “episodes” view (because the only information that Plex has to use is the “original-air-date” of 2019 for all those entries). It only shows the next broadcast. Since this apparently gets added on to the DVR schedule as a text match to “Miami Vice” (I didn’t test this yet), I imagine this is a non-issue on usability, but it doesn’t look good…
Everything (except “Movies”, as they’re not treated as “Shows”) is now listed as “new”, as you were experiencing before. I theorize (and this is just a theory, I didn’t test it and I don’t think I care to) that Plex identifies everything as new unless it has a Broadcast Date that matches a previous broadcast date on the cached EPG (let’s say an episode of a TV show that aired on Monday is being re-broadcasted on Thursday and the “original-air-date” points to the existing Monday entry) as I have identically named weekly TV Shows with the same “original-air-date” of “2019” and both are flagged as “new”.
tl;dr: The way Plex decides what is a Movie and what is a TV Show and, off the TV Show “basket”, what is Sports and what is News is less than ideal because it removes that choice from the user, specially since “episode number” and “original broadcast” are not even on the OTA EPG spec, as far as I am aware, while alluding that the user can change those settings. The work around I found is to trick Plex into identifying things the way you want by painfully researching what tags it uses to do so.
My proposed solution: Just use the categories to identify the 4 major types and let us add aliases to them. If a show has multiple categories, just list the same show on all categories that are matched. Read and use the extra information if it’s there, but if it’s not, no big deal.
