Emby Misidentifying movies even after giving correct IMDB id

[milindmody 2]

I am seeing more instances of Emby misidentifying movies in the first scan. Usually - when this happens, Removing id and rescanning or by giving correct imdb id - the library scan generally gets it right second time. But now, once movie is misidentified.. there is nothing I can do to remove the wrong movie info. The only option I have is to manually add everything and lock the meta data so it does not change. This is very cumbersome. I do not know if this problem is due to IMDB security upgrades or a basic problem with Emby library scanning. I am using emby server 4.9.5.0 and the current movie I am facing problem with is Pierre (1977) which somehow it identifies as Star Wars (1977).

[GrimReaper 5042]

1 hour ago, milindmody said:

But now, once movie is misidentified.. there is nothing I can do to remove the wrong movie info

What do you mean by that? There's Identify (ditto Remove Identification) dropdown selection present on any identifiable item. 

[milindmody 2]

Remove Identification - does not remove Movie poster image ( if that's already scanned). Other information is removed. But when I select "Identify" and put in the imdb id, it shows right movie in results - but when I select it - the final movie and meta data is from completely wrong movie. This has happened twice in last few days. Raising it here - so if others have also experienced it - they can report. 

[GrimReaper 5042]

20 minutes ago, milindmody said:

But when I select "Identify" and put in the imdb id, it shows right movie in results - but when I select it - the final movie and meta data is from completely wrong movie. This has happened twice in last few days

Post server log after doing that. 

How to Report a Problem

Edit: What are your library enabled meta-downloaders and in what order? 

Edited 46 minutes ago by GrimReaper

[milindmody 2]

Thanks for asking about the metadata provider order — that pointed me in the right direction. I ran my server log through Claude to dig into it, and here's what it found (yes, TMDB is my primary/first metadata provider):

• TMDB was timing out on every single call during both sessions where I hit this issue. Every request to TMDB — both name search and direct IMDb-ID lookup — hung for exactly 20 seconds and then failed with a connection timeout. This happened consistently, not as a one-off, across both attempts.
• Because TMDB never responded, the only provider that actually ran during the real metadata refresh/apply step was TheTVDB (OMDb only got queried once during the initial search preview, not during the actual write). Right after applying the correct IMDb ID, the log shows TheTVDB being queried and the item coming back mislabeled as a completely different movie — every time, even though the ID I applied was correct. This happened on my first attempt, again after a second correction attempt, and a third time later the same day.

So the Identify dialog shows the correct match (built while TMDB/OMDb search results were still coming through), but the actual metadata write afterward falls through to TheTVDB since TMDB is unreachable, and TheTVDB resolves the title incorrectly, silently overwriting the correct selection.

Claude's takeaway: this looks like two compounding issues — TMDB connectivity timing out on my end (server/network issue, not necessarily an Emby bug), and TheTVDB producing a bad match for this title when it becomes the fallback. Going to check my TMDB connectivity and consider whether TheTVDB should be enabled for my movies library at all. 

Thanks for all the help. I know what to do.