Here is more background on why they’re on my list.
PBS shows are notoriously missing from any DB. They’re distributed only through PBS, but are for the most part indpendent productions and episode details post-broadcast are usually only available from the show’s website if they even have one. Hence the entries for Project Smoke, Project Fire, Emeril, etc. If it isn’t in the guide data, it won’t be there.
And on some random website or even an episode guide, there isn’t a way to pull that information in any kind of usable format or API. It’s literally extracting it from some web page if it is even available. So the entries almost always have to be coded as a correction in MCE Buddy and if there is any metadata, it is almost always only what was in the guide data included by HDHR DVR when the show was recorded OTA. Any YT, web, or other sources of the episodes are pretty much SOL.
I wish there was a way to build a text file manually (JSON, XML, YAML, etc.) and be able to re-process with MCEBuddy (Custom Cuts?) that would JUST merge in the new metadata and not touch the streams - I don’t need any demux/mux/transcoding).
The entries for ATK and Chris Kimball’s Milk Street Kitchen are because apostrophes and quote marks are mangled in the guide data and databases - is it a single quote, an apostrophe, a close-single-quote and is it in ASCII or UTF-8 or some other character set encoding etc. It’s just a mess with special characters - mainly quote marks (single, double, open, close, universal) and dashes (hyphen, em-dash, en-dash). Hence the judicious use of minimal text matching and wildcards to ignore whatever weird junk ends up in the show name.
Amazing Race and Survivor are on there because they couldn’t get the season information right and Plex kept picking the “first” entry for the show when the show is available in multiple languages. So Plex would always pick Survivor - Albanian edition or some non-US version of the show.
I also have to tell Plex to prioritize the media metadata (that MCEBuddy puts there) over its own “agent” lookups in TVDB with fallback to IMDB (due to the massive numbers of Plex users doing that and IMDB having a sad for not being able to get money from Plex or their users to make Jeff Bezos even more money and blocking Plex requests on their “public” API).
And I’ve probably got some cleanup to do for shows that no longer air (John Besh, Cobra, Will & Grace).
