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Surviving the whims of TVDB users/mods changing numbering


ginjaninja

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ginjaninja

It seems to be happening more and more often, that long established episode and season number schemes are being changed on TVDB.

I wonder if  the episode TVDBID is unique and persistent enough, that the emby tvdb fetcher could be extended to use this ID to place content by number and season when availbale. ie by reading the id from a prescribed syntax in the filename eg _tvdbid_#####.ext

I dont care what the perceived wisdom is about is this a special, is it a season, i am happy to defer to TVDB, but it is  annoying to have to keep changing my folder structure to match changes on tvdb.

in this way it is hoped that the tvdb mods/users can change things around as much as they like but my content will still have the correct pictures and description and conform to the current (but often changing) numbering scheme of tvdb.

just an idea, no easy answers, just wondering if its feasible / a long time coming.

 

Edited by ginjaninja
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ginjaninja
1 minute ago, cayars said:

Hi,

You should not be changing your folder structure to match TVDB.  You should use the standard naming convention in our knowledge base

https://support.emby.media/support/solutions/articles/44001159110-tv-naming

I dont think this will help if s01e07 is changed to s02e01 on tvdb,

if you agree it might be better to delete our comments as it may hurt discussion.

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One2Go

I feel your pain and have come across the same difficulties but have come to a different solution which I share at the end. But first my own observations about TVDB.

TVDB has its own ideas and standards and they have set themselves up as the reference how TV Shows, seasons and episodes are to be catalogued. Their forum is filled with complaints about why they don't follow the networks or content providers order. In addition they sometimes decide to change a content providers release of two combined episodes to split them up in to two. The whole season release is 3 episodes of 90 minutes yet they decide to do 6 episodes. Or they change the name of the show. Take the example of Deutschland, Amazon is the content provider, the show came out and is listed with Amazon at Deutschland 83, Deutschland 86 and soon to be released Deutschland 89. What does TVDB do they decided to call the show Deutschland and season 1 is Deutschland 83, Season 2 is Deutschland 86 and season 3 is Deutschland 89. They decide what is correct not the content provider.

Bottom line TVDB think they are God's gift to us and therefore take liberties on what they decided to be correct. To get around their arrogant attitude I have done the following. I use Media Center Master to collect my meta data. then I make modifications in the XML file to my liking, change their often crappy or totally wrong Episode thumb pictures and then let Emby import it, job done after that I lock the show so not no other changes will ever take place.

The big advantage is you decide the order on your servers no one else, you make changes to your liking. Here is a good example. I watch the shows Arrow and Flash. They do have crossover episodes on the the same episode name but in shows like Supergirl, Batwoman and Legends of tomorrow. So one episode in Arrow may require to watch a total of 5 episodes in 4 other shows to conclude the theme. Since I only follow Arrow and Flash how to deal with the crossover episodes? Simple turn them into extras for the Arrow show and get the meta data for those extras, then modify the XML file to the correct data, attach the correct thumb pictures and presto all the crossover episodes from 3 other shows are listed in the Arrow extras. After that again lock Emby so no changes can be made to your meta data and your structure stays intact.

Hope this will give you an idea and some more work to do 😀 it is a really bad idea to tie your software and operation to a meta provider, if they change structure, APIs or worst start charging now for access or just vanish from the online community your up the creek. I prefer the flexibility of downloading meta data, importing it and then locking it. If changes are needed later on do them manually.

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MRobi
9 minutes ago, One2Go said:

TVDB has its own ideas and standards and they have set themselves up as the reference how TV Shows, seasons and episodes are to be catalogued. Their forum is filled with complaints about why they don't follow the networks or content providers order. In addition they sometimes decide to change a content providers release of two combined episodes to split them up in to two. The whole season release is 3 episodes of 90 minutes yet they decide to do 6 episodes. Or they change the name of the show. Take the example of Deutschland, Amazon is the content provider, the show came out and is listed with Amazon at Deutschland 83, Deutschland 86 and soon to be released Deutschland 89. What does TVDB do they decided to call the show Deutschland and season 1 is Deutschland 83, Season 2 is Deutschland 86 and season 3 is Deutschland 89. They decide what is correct not the content provider

This right here drives me insane! There's a crossover miniseries on Netflix called Game On: A Crossover Event!. All 4 series involved are Netflix series. Netflix released this series as a standalone show with a unique series id. Right on the netflix website it lists it as S01 Episodes 1-4. The series has been created at least twice on TVDB and it's been removed each time as they have decided it's not actually a series. Instead they split the 4 episodes up and put 1 episode as a special in each series. This is not at all how Netflix released it, nor is it how any of the release groups released it. Who the hell are they to decide that the network that OWNS the series is wrong!!

So the whole thing requires a ton of manual intervention on my part which is what I hate having to do!

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Gilgamesh_48

My experience with Emby and TheTVDB is quite different form what is being reported in this thread. I have had no problems worth mentioning with matching of TV shows and every series I have, except about two or three,  have matched perfectly on the first try and those that did not matched after a fix match was performed. I "think" there might have been one or two that had a few episodes out of order but mostly I ignored that as they were quite old series and the order that played in really did not matter.

On the couple that it mattered in it was a simple matter of renaming the files to correct the order.

I do not require perfection but rather just need "good enough."

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pwhodges

+1

Even in a fairly extreme case in which TVDB makes a bad job of a tricky series (Bakemonogatari and its successors) I have found it possible to get Emby to display it the way I want in spite of needing to name files oddly to get them recognised by TVDB.  I've documented this in the forum a couple of times before.

But some series create a real difficulty by being broadcast in different forms at different times.  Vienna Blood is three episodes in Europe, and six in the US.  As I recall, TVDB uses the 6-part formulation and TMDB uses the 3-part breakdown*.  I have the series as three episodes (because that's how it was conceived), so initially I used the multi-episodes naming of the files to work with TVDB.  I then found a way to force Emby to get the metadata from TMDB instead, and then locked it.

Paul

* EDIT - I checked; TVDB now has it as the correct three episodes, and has locked it to keep it right.

Edited by pwhodges
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paulsalter
13 hours ago, One2Go said:

I feel your pain and have come across the same difficulties but have come to a different solution which I share at the end. But first my own observations about TVDB.

TVDB has its own ideas and standards and they have set themselves up as the reference how TV Shows, seasons and episodes are to be catalogued. Their forum is filled with complaints about why they don't follow the networks or content providers order. In addition they sometimes decide to change a content providers release of two combined episodes to split them up in to two. The whole season release is 3 episodes of 90 minutes yet they decide to do 6 episodes. Or they change the name of the show. Take the example of Deutschland, Amazon is the content provider, the show came out and is listed with Amazon at Deutschland 83, Deutschland 86 and soon to be released Deutschland 89. What does TVDB do they decided to call the show Deutschland and season 1 is Deutschland 83, Season 2 is Deutschland 86 and season 3 is Deutschland 89. They decide what is correct not the content provider.

Bottom line TVDB think they are God's gift to us and therefore take liberties on what they decided to be correct. To get around their arrogant attitude I have done the following. I use Media Center Master to collect my meta data. then I make modifications in the XML file to my liking, change their often crappy or totally wrong Episode thumb pictures and then let Emby import it, job done after that I lock the show so not no other changes will ever take place.

The big advantage is you decide the order on your servers no one else, you make changes to your liking. Here is a good example. I watch the shows Arrow and Flash. They do have crossover episodes on the the same episode name but in shows like Supergirl, Batwoman and Legends of tomorrow. So one episode in Arrow may require to watch a total of 5 episodes in 4 other shows to conclude the theme. Since I only follow Arrow and Flash how to deal with the crossover episodes? Simple turn them into extras for the Arrow show and get the meta data for those extras, then modify the XML file to the correct data, attach the correct thumb pictures and presto all the crossover episodes from 3 other shows are listed in the Arrow extras. After that again lock Emby so no changes can be made to your meta data and your structure stays intact.

Hope this will give you an idea and some more work to do 😀 it is a really bad idea to tie your software and operation to a meta provider, if they change structure, APIs or worst start charging now for access or just vanish from the online community your up the creek. I prefer the flexibility of downloading meta data, importing it and then locking it. If changes are needed later on do them manually.

This is why tvdb are strict on the naming (if i am looking at the correct show)

In Germany the show is called Deutschland with the various seasons,  this is also not 3 x90 min episodes and is not an Amazon show

Amazon air it in the US and have combined the episodes, which is not how it original aired, the '83 one is 8 episodes long of 45 mins each

tvdb have the episodes correct

 

Edited by paulsalter
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One2Go
7 hours ago, paulsalter said:

This is why tvdb are strict on the naming (if i am looking at the correct show)

In Germany the show is called Deutschland with the various seasons,  this is also not 3 x90 min episodes and is not an Amazon show

Amazon air it in the US and have combined the episodes, which is not how it original aired, the '83 one is 8 episodes long of 45 mins each

tvdb have the episodes correct

 

The reference to 3 x 90 minutes episodes was regarding a totally different show as the poster above you showed. Regarding the Deutschland show Amazon was late to the scene as the first segment was created by RTL (DE) and Sundance TV (US). After that Amazon bought the rights to the TV series and decided in the beginning, before the Deutschland 89 creation, to name it separately. In Germany it is listed as seasons while in the US Amazon site it is still separate. This is a prime exclusive content so they decide on the naming structure. The point is still valid you decide how to catalogue it as one show with 3 different seasons 83-89 or as 3 separate shows 83-89 as in the beginning before the decision to add Deutschland 89 it was listed as two separate entries. If that is what you entered it in Emby then when they switched their naming structure if you follow how I implemented it no changes are made to the existing cataloguing just add the 3rd segment.

I want to be independent from TVDB once I got the meta data and saved it on the server. One time meta data fetching, One time modification  and locked for preserving my structure and data.

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MRobi

All of my issues with TheTVDB have not been on the Emby side, but always on the Sonarr side. When TVDB lists things one way and the release groups lists things the way the network does it causes all kinds of issues. 

Money Heist was a prime example of this. TVDB did eventually add a secondary order for "Netflix", but the apps only support the primary order which is completely different. What a nightmare that one was getting it all ordered properly.

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