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American Dad - Overriding season numbers


mjb2000
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mjb2000

I've been scratching my head over American Dad...

 

TheTVDB which is the data source for MB states the we are currently in Season 12 of American Dad (with S12E02 screened on 27/10/2014). The rationale for this season number comes is explained here - essentially theTVDB is honoring the original FOX season numbers, which includes just 7 episodes in Season 1. 

 

Unfortunately, almost every other website uses a different set of seasons, which put the current season at 11. Importantly, any place you might choose to download an episode also uses S11 as the current season, which means that you can't use the auto-organise function to import the episode, since it will match the wrong meta-data from theTVDB.

 

Is there anything that can be done about this? The forums on theTVDB make it clear they're not going to change their numbering, and there are too many other sites using S11 to expect them all to suddenly adopt theTVDB numbering system, so it seams this is likely to be something we're going to have to 'fudge' our end.

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mjb2000

Forgive me, but, it's not...
 

I was pretty clear that I understood neither TheTVDB or the many other sites were likely to change their naming conventions. What I was looking for was a way we could handle this dis-parity at our end so we can continue to use the auto-organise feature to import shows seamlessly.

 

Question continues...

Edited by mjb2000
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  • Solution

Pretty sure his tongue was planted firmly in his cheek when he posted that.  I believe it is a reference to the response usually received by tvdb when such changes are requested.

 

In any case, I don't know what we can do here.  We need to rely on the authority of the data providers.  We can't start trying to override certain conventions for certain shows. 

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mjb2000

Hmmm - Fair enough. I guess we'll just have to keep downloading manually and renaming files before adding to MB3.

 

Thanks for your time

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CashMoney

Same problem with Tanked. :) Personally I let MB display Tanked in the order it has from TVDB, but I rename the download and use MB auto organise to sort it out. For the record I don't use MB auto organise for anything else*, but its dead handy for these situations.

 

*Not because I think its bad or anything, far from it. I just have a pre-existing setup that works without a need for it. Except of course when the TVDB doesn't agree with everyone else :)

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Lighthammer

I've actually noticed a full on resistance from anyone / everyone to use what's on the various DB sites and I've been continued to be a bit shocked by this.

Fox had some really weird numbering schemes and production for this show, but I don't feel it gives the user base the right to say "Well, we think it should be this way and we're going to number it differently".

If anything, I feel "we" should hold Fox's nose to the ground to ensure they DON'T do this thing again. Fox is pretty notorious (though slightly better in recent years) to have stupidly productions of series. Fox is pretty single handily ruined shows just because they didn't quite do what they wanted despite them being good. 

My honest opinion is when Fox acts stupid, call them on it by voicing your opinion to them. If they never hear from you, they don't have a reason to believe their actions were jarring to people; they can continue to lie to themselves by manipulating the numbers they get from various reporters to make them say what they want to think they say.

Edited by Lighthammer
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ginjaninja

Pretty sure his tongue was planted firmly in his cheek when he posted that.  I believe it is a reference to the response usually received by tvdb when such changes are requested.

 

In any case, I don't know what we can do here.  We need to rely on the authority of the data providers.  We can't start trying to override certain conventions for certain shows. 

It would not break the philosophy of following the data providers, to have an internal function within media browser auto organise....which said for a given show....always add 1 to Season of any auto organised episode for that season.

it just means that S11E01 of american dad is organised/moved onto filesystem as S12E01 and fetched from TVDB as S12E01....the tvdb logic is unaffected...

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Lighthammer

It's more the problem of getting into creating exceptions.

If you set the precedent it's ok to alter the official listings for one series where do you draw the line that it's not.

It's a slippery slope.

Let me ask this another way: what is the problem with 'you' (everyone having this problem) adapting to the official listings?

I mean seriously, if it would help, I'll create a small tutorial of how you can quickly rename all your files to match the official listings. 

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mjb2000

I agree - some ground rules need to be set - It would seem to make sense if all torrents for that particular show are using an alternate naming convention then this would be a good criteria for a small 'hack' to accommodate for this. In cases where current season torrents don't agree on any specific season then we should leave it for manual naming.

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Lighthammer

But see, this behavior of using unofficially ordered episodes should be mitigated, not endorsed.

I think if we correct the listings on our side, we'll be able to better deal with this.

A few tools everyone who is managing something like Media Browser or Plex should be well aware of is Name it Your Way (NIYoW), Directory List & Print, MP3Tag and having a good understanding of an auxiliary tool like Excel is just fundamental.

Heck, I'll break into a small rant about this: File naming tools are becoming more and more important in our society as we get deeper into the information age. I actually feel as though this should be something outright taught some where in K-12 as a sort of introduction in logic / algebra. File managed on the level of server management is literally algebra in real world application.

Server File management and automation can only take you so far. 

That being said, I attached MY listings for American Dad. With a little parsing and NIYoW, everyone in this thread can now rename all their episodes in less then 5 minutes. I bet people who are using NIYoW for the first time can even do it n less then 15. Again, I'm more then happy to write a quick tutorial for anyone who can't figure it out.

American Dad Episodes.txt

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techywarrior

I agree - some ground rules need to be set - It would seem to make sense if all torrents for that particular show are using an alternate naming convention then this would be a good criteria for a small 'hack' to accommodate for this. In cases where current season torrents don't agree on any specific season then we should leave it for manual naming.

Also, since torrenting shows isn't endorsed by MB due to it being illegal it's hard to justify developing a work around at the server level to handle the difference between the torrent naming convention for a show and the "official" naming.

 

Let's not get off topic and discuss torrenting but just understand that feature requests are probably going to need a legit reason to be widely considered.

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jhoff80

But see, this behavior of using unofficially ordered episodes should be mitigated, not endorsed.

 

I think if we correct the listings on our side, we'll be able to better deal with this.

 

A few tools everyone who is managing something like Media Browser or Plex should be well aware of is Name it Your Way (NIYoW), Directory List & Print, MP3Tag and having a good understanding of an auxiliary tool like Excel is just fundamental.

 

Heck, I'll break into a small rant about this: File naming tools are becoming more and more important in our society as we get deeper into the information age. I actually feel as though this should be something outright taught some where in K-12 as a sort of introduction in logic / algebra. File managed on the level of server management is literally algebra in real world application.

 

Server File management and automation can only take you so far. 

 

That being said, I attached MY listings for American Dad. With a little parsing and NIYoW, everyone in this thread can now rename all their episodes in less then 5 minutes. I bet people who are using NIYoW for the first time can even do it n less then 15. Again, I'm more then happy to write a quick tutorial for anyone who can't figure it out.

 

As far as I know (as I can't connect to TVDB at the moment), even your list is incorrect according to 'official' sources.  'Blonde Ambition' is considered the premiere of season 12 because the show is no longer on Fox - that's the first episode airing on TBS.

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Lighthammer

That's REALLY being nitpicky focusing in on the last couple of entries, you know?

Anyone following the show isn't exactly sure how the episode seasons are going to pan out for a while yet. Season 11 an Season 12 have VERY different start and end points largely because of Fox is being a little annoyingly stupid with coming clean how they are dealing with the transition. Fairly, they're the guys making this hard --- but it *IS* Fox. Fox *IS* notorious for this crap (bluntly). 

 

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jluce50

A few tools everyone who is managing something like Media Browser or Plex should be well aware of is Name it Your Way (NIYoW), Directory List & Print, MP3Tag and having a good understanding of an auxiliary tool like Excel is just fundamental.

 

 

NIYoW is a great little program, thanks! Another good one that I've been using for a while is KRename. It's portable and pretty powerful in its own right.

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Lighthammer

I might have to look at that one. NIYoW is good, but no one has updated it in years now. It's feeling old. It does the job, but it notably has some minor inconvenient problems with Windows 8+

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mjb2000

I agree, and don't actually download these shows - but it seems that many people are and that some of the numbering is being distorted by the people who do and it adds to the confusion of what season we are in.

 

Maybe episode names are going to be the only reliable way of knowing what's going on! :)

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techywarrior

It's unfortunate but if the "authority" decides that the episodes should be played in reverse order the software has to just do that because ultimately, as ebr said, it relies on an authoritative service. At least MB allows you to manually override whatever you want, but that takes manual effort.

 

I remember a similar issue with Firefly. When the show was aired it wasn't in the originally intended order (and some episodes never were shown). When the DVD set was released they put the episodes in the originally intended order. So now you have two different orders. One is the "correct" way and the other is the order they aired.

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mjb2000

It is a minefield - You can't even go with DVD releases in some cases. I remember the UK and US Family Guy DVDs had different grouping of episodes didn't they?

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Chris Jones

This is the same for Futurama which i've just been adding to my collection. Originally it was annoying that the episodes don't match but then i realised that i'm not necessarily just trying to have an exact copy of my DVDs on my server (which are going in my attic), but they are now a collection. As long as i'm not missing episodes and they play in an order that actually makes sense it doesn't really matter.

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ginjaninja

It's more the problem of getting into creating exceptions.

 

If you set the precedent it's ok to alter the official listings for one series where do you draw the line that it's not.

 

It's a slippery slope.

 

Let me ask this another way: what is the problem with 'you' (everyone having this problem) adapting to the official listings?

 

I mean seriously, if it would help, I'll create a small tutorial of how you can quickly rename all your files to match the official listings.

To answer your question...

I want to use the official listings..but the sourcefiles dont match..

So for me the feature request would be, a setting within autoorganise, per show, which modified season number of the autoorganised episode..

No doubt a minor issue with a work around..but i have deleted much content to date..because i forgot to make this manual change prior to autoorganising...

Edited by ginjaninja
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techywarrior

The request you are suggesting, if I understand correctly isn't very feasible because it would need to know the naming convention from your "source" and the official one for every show that this happens with.

 

You are better off manually doing it I'm afraid.

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ginjaninja

The request you are suggesting, if I understand correctly isn't very feasible because it would need to know the naming convention from your "source" and the official one for every show that this happens with.

 

You are better off manually doing it I'm afraid.

i disagree...it is feasible when the user accepts that any configured offset for a show will always be the same.

for my use cases the offset is always the same..ie +1 of season compared to source.

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dimitrik

An alternative would be to have a function in metadata editor allowing one to select sorting for each series by "Aired order", "DVD order" or "Absolute order" (all three are variables in TVDB).

 

I use Metabrowser to fetch metadata for my collection and it allows you to set "Fetch Order" and "Display Order" on a per series level.  Unfortunately MB3 will still onlu read the Aired order and use it for displaying the collection.

 

If we had the ability to set the display order, I'm sure 99% of the problem cases would be solved.

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