Issue: TVShow season metadata, sort order, Next Up

[puithove 208]

I ran into an issue over the past couple days.  I started watching the most recent season of "Survivor" which is Season 29.  I have previous seasons in the library that are all marked as Watched.  I noticed that Season 28 (the previous season) was actually sorted at the end of the season list - so the sort order was like this:

• ...
• Season 27
• Season 29
• Season 28

Also, after watching a couple episodes, I noticed that Survivor was not appearing in the Next Up listings.  I wondered if this was related, so I dug into the season issue first.  I looked in Metadata Manager and noticed that Season 28 was the only season missing data - but only at the season level.  All Season 28 episodes themselves had good data.  I verified everything on thetvdb.com looked good.

 

I then looked at the metadata services settings on my server and noticed that the provider for Season data comes from themoviedb.com.  When I verified there, all of Season 28 was missing.  I added the data to themoviedb, and then after a refresh, everything (including Next Up) was working.  This raises some questions/concerns in my mind though.

 

1. Sometimes in the TV metadata world, there are disputes on the numbering/naming of seasons - disputes on at what episode the season break occurs or even how many seasons there are.  We might end up with thetvdb settling on one ordering, and themoviedb settling on another.
2. themoviedb is new to the TV game, it's likely their data won't be as complete.

For whatever reason, if they're out of sync, we might see issues.  So:

1. Should the actual order of the seasons be determined by the downloaded metadata, or by the naming of the season?  I see too much potential for things to go wrong between the two databases and that shouldn't be allowed to affect the display/usage in our libraries.
2. If metadata for seasons is missing from themoviedb, but episode data has been downloaded, could the season start date that MB uses just be determined by episode #1 for the season?  This is actually what themoviedb does anyway when you enter data - it takes the date from episode #1 and that's the date it uses for the season start.
3. Even if the seasons are out of order, shouldn't there be a way to make Next Up work as the user would expect?
4. And for the hard-hitting question:  is the data that is gleaned for the season level even valuable enough to deal with the issues?

 

Just taking a random sampling of other shows in my library, I see at least a couple others that are in the same state that Survivor was.

 

I don't have any issue with entering things into either/any of the online public databases, but I doubt everyone feels the same.  

 

Just some things to think about, thanks!

[puithove 208]

This got moved to the Windows subforum, so I want to mention that this wouldn't be specific to Windows, it affects all versions.  I'm actually running on Linux, and this is where I observed the issue.