What are my options if Emby does not identify a TV Series?

[musicmafia 38]

Hey Everybody! I have a TV series that will not identify properly. The series has been listed on imdb for 20 years but does not seem to be on TVDB. Is that the problem? If so, what are my options?

PS I manually entered as much of the info as I could but it still gives me no access to series info, artwork, episodes, descriptions, etc. 

Thanks!

[GrimReaper 4740]

1 minute ago, musicmafia said:

The series has been listed on imdb for 20 years but does not seem to be on TVDB. Is that the problem?

It is. 

1 minute ago, musicmafia said:

If so, what are my options?

Which series is it? 

[musicmafia 38]

The show is called Alive & Well with Michelle Harris and the Imdb ID is tt0417298. 

From your response I'm guessing Emby does not link with Imdb. TVDB is identifying it as a different show from the BBC.

[GrimReaper 4740]

9 minutes ago, musicmafia said:

The show is called Alive & Well with Michelle Harris

Guess you're out of luck, neither TVDB nor TMDB (nor TVMaze) have that show listed, the only trace can be found on OMDB with very limited data provided:

{"Title":"Alive & Well with Michelle Harris","Year":"2002–","Rated":"N/A","Released":"03 Jan 2002","Runtime":"30 min","Genre":"Family","Director":"N/A","Writer":"N/A","Actors":"Michelle Harris","Plot":"N/A","Language":"English","Country":"USA","Awards":"1 win.","Poster":"N/A","Ratings":[],"Metascore":"N/A","imdbRating":"N/A","imdbVotes":"N/A","imdbID":"tt0417298","Type":"series","totalSeasons":"11","Response":"True"}

At this point, the only thing you can do is manually fill metadata - or be a good champ and add that series to TVDB for community's benefit. 

13 minutes ago, musicmafia said:

I'm guessing Emby does not link with Imdb

It doesn't (due to prohibitive cost), ImdbId is used only for lookup through other providers db. 

[pwhodges 2012]

Even IMDB has only about 20% of the episodes.  The series own website doesn't help either.

Paul

[jiggity 35]

For the one TV series I have that is in IMDB with minimal info and not in TVDB or TMDB, I had to manually enter the metadata in Emby and then lock the series info

You can enter the IMDB info in the Emby metadata when manually editing

Hope that helps you get your unlisted series to show correctly in Emby

[pwhodges 2012]

Alternatively, you can enter the same information into TVDB, and then it'll be there for you (when you rescan) and anyone else!

It's actually quite easy.

Paul

Edited May 31, 2023 by pwhodges
Can't type my own name!

[musicmafia 38]

1 hour ago, pwhodges said:

Alternatively, you can enter the same information into TVDB, and then it'll be there for you (when you rescan) and anyone else!

It's actually quite easy.

Paul

Thanks. I went to the TVDB site and created an account and entered the show info manually, along with the show's Imdb ID, which I am hoping it will pull data from? I then went to enter details (host, artwork) and it errored on the host and told me I couldn't add art for 6 days. I'll check back in there later. 

[pwhodges 2012]

It doesn't get any info from IMDB that I know of, though it does check the IMDB and TMDB id numbers match the show name you put in (if you put them in).

The art thing's odd - I was adding some just a few days ago.  Perhaps there's a delay on new accounts or something.

Paul

[musicmafia 38]

No idea why it wouldn't let me fill the "actor" portion. It kept saying to choose a role or character and I kept choosing "Host" and it would say I need to choose again.

So I moved to the art tab and indeed it said as a new account I couldn't add art for 6 days. 

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

4 hours ago, jiggity said:

For the one TV series I have that is in IMDB with minimal info and not in TVDB or TMDB, I had to manually enter the metadata in Emby and then lock the series info

You can enter the IMDB info in the Emby metadata when manually editing

Hope that helps you get your unlisted series to show correctly in Emby

I have done that for several series.
The ones involved for me are
1. Japanese (2 shows)
2. German (1 show)
3. French (4 shows)
4. Russian (1 show)

In all those cases I found the synopsis for the whole show and episodes on the web and then simply copied and pasted those into the appropriate fields. It was before online translators were any good but I mostly read those languages OK, except for Russian. There I actually had to beg a favor from an old acquaintance of mine and she did the translation. It was into German but that is OK.

Today, if I were starting from scratch, I would probably try and fix TheTVDB but I am not even sure that web site existed 35 years ago.

However, I have found that it really was not necessary as the old shows did a synopsis and look back at the start of every episode except for one of the Japanese titles.

one more BTW: The original bitrates and formatting for the French and Japanese titles was much better that USA shows in the same time frame and, after a re-rip, their picture quality looked better, or at least as good as, most of the best we see today. I believe the higher refresh rate of the original material had a lot to do with that. Plus the fact that the original encoding was done in Japan and France. We may have been first with broadcast commercial  TV but the French and the Japanese and, maybe, the Italians were the first to really get it right. It fact our being first condemned us to poor picture quality for many many many years. My eyes remember it well, but a little blurry.