Am I doing this wrong? TV episode collections being strangely built

[markmarz]

I have 10 complete TV series featuring John Thaw (Inspector Morse, Redcap, Monsignor Renard, A Year in Provence, The Sweeney, etc).

Before running PMM for a single TV collection I had no TV collections for John Thaw at all. After running, I have 2 collections, both named John Thaw.

The first collection has 2 complete series in it, but episodes are not listed separately. It also has the poster and summary I specified.

The second collection has a list of episodes for Inspector Morse and The Sweeney, but no series (as was in the first collection). It has no poster or summary.

This is a snippet of the config.yml file:

libraries:
  TV:
    metadata_path:
     - folder: config/TV/
  Movies:

This is the sole configuration file in the TV directory referenced above:

root@omv:~/pmm/TV# cat john_thaw_imdb.yml

collections:

  John Thaw:
    url_poster: https://i.imgur.com/Mt1fsdQm.jpg
    collection_level: episode
    collection_order: release
    sort_title: John Thaw
    imdb_list: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=tv_movie,tv_episode,tv_special,tv_miniseries&role=nm0857177
    summary: "John Edward Thaw, CBE (3 January 1942 – 21 February 2002) was an English actor who appeared in a range of television, stage, and cinema roles. He starred in the television series Inspector Morse as title character Detective Chief Inspector Endeavour Morse, Redcap as Sergeant John Mann, The Sweeney as Detective Inspector Jack Regan, Home to Roost as Henry Willows, and Kavanagh QC as title character James Kavanagh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Thaw"

root@omv:~/pmm/TV#

The IMDb search URL works fine when I run it from a browser. So why am I getting 2 collections? And why is neither collection complete?

I would open a bug and submit logs, etc., but more than likely I'm just doing something wrong.

Thanks!
Mark M.

[chazlarson]

Can you provide the meta.log?

[markmarz]

meta.log

[chazlarson]

One of those collections [the one with the two items] wasn't created by a recent version of PMM:

|=============================== Unmanaged Collections in TV Library ================================|
...
[2022-07-26 20:11:34,835] [operations.py:449]         [INFO]     | John Thaw                                                                                          |
...

I'm a bit surprised that you ended up with two by the very same name, but I suspect there was a case change at some point and Plex internally sees one as "john thaw" or the like.

PMM adds a "PMM" label to collections that it creates, and unless told specifically, typically won't do anything with collections it didn't create.

Perhaps that one was created by an older version? The log only shows the one episode-level collection being created and the other called out as unmanaged.

I'd delete them both and rerun PMM to see if you get one or two [I don't expect you to end up with two].

[markmarz]

Is there a way to run the nightly update with docker? I've been running the official image and don't know how to pull an image for a nightly run (if such exists).

Rather not mess with non-docker install if I can avoid it.

Here's my current run script (haven't yet set it up for background run or schedule):
docker run --rm -v "/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-1c9bf009-c625-4afc-890f-6b278fdf6fe2/dockers/plex-meta-manager:/config:rw" meisnate12/plex-meta-manager --config config/config.yml --run

[meisnate12]

change meisnate12/plex-meta-manager to meisnate12/plex-meta-manager:nightly

[markmarz]

Thanks! Just ran and now when running the original query, I get only 1 collection, with proper poster & summary. That collection has 85 episodes, which matches the adjusted query:

old (added bogus collection): imdb_list: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=tv_movie,tv_episode,tv_special,tv_miniseries&role=nm0857177
new (no bogus collection): imdb_list: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=tv_movie,tv_episode,tv_special,tv_miniseries&role=nm0857177
old adjusted query (no bogus collection):  https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=tv_episode&role=nm0857177

So I think you fixed it. Thank you!!

While I have you on the line, I'd like to ask a related question. Please feel free to tell me to ask the question in Q&A or Feature Request if you'd rather. Right now I'm in the middle of a tedious process of adding the IMDb ID to every episode on TMDB where there's any chance of me adding the episode to my Plex TV library. This is for Warren Oates, who did a heck of a lot of TV work. While doing that, I see that 99% of the episodes on TMDb exist and already list Oates as a guest star. So my question is, is it a big deal to add episode retrieval to a tmdb query, rather than have to use an imdb query which itself generates a query using the IMDb ID against TMDB?

OTOH I could just be screwing up how to retrieve episodes from TMDB. So far I've only been successful retrieving episodes with IMDb queries.

Thanks again!

[meisnate12]

so theres no way on tmdb to search and get episodes back theres no Discover Endpoint for Episodes like there is for movies and shows.

[markmarz]

Okay, oh well, them's the breaks!

Thanks for your help and @chazlarson as well. Wonderful program!

[chazlarson]

Plex can sometimes get confused when collections get renamed. I was suggesting that perhaps at one time there was a collection named "john thaw" or the like, and that collection was later renamed to "John Thaw", so the internal name was different and Plex doesn't see them as having the same name. Just speculation based on the contents of the log.

[markmarz]

Ah, I see. Nope, I never had a John Thaw TV (or even Movie) collection before today. Any that were created were created by PMM.

[markmarz]

@meisnate12 Answered what turned out to be a bug.