Apologizing to TV Maze

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

When I first heard about TV Maze I thought it was simply another "junk" metadata method and I posted in a few threads that I did not think it really had a purpose. In that I was wrong, VERY wrong. 

I was having a problem with the series "Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer" in that The "TV DB" had German as the language to use for metadata for about 80% of the episodes. I tried a few other metadata providers but they all had problems of one sort or another. I decided to not be excessively pigheaded and try "TV Maze."
To my extreme surprise that worked and it worked even better than expected. It fixed "Mike Hammer" and it also improved a number of other series that had incomplete or inaccurate data. 
I do not know, yet, if any other problems will crop up but, for now, everything seems fine and I am very pleased. 

I did not have to do anything special other than enabling "TV Maze" and moving it to the top in every section of my TV metadata providers. 

I do have one question though. Is there any metadata provider that does similar work for movies? The defaults do not find all my movies and I have had to manually get metadata and insert it into the correct fields. Also a few movies have incomplete or botched metadata something like I found in my earlier report. Mainly the ones that have wrong metadata use the wrong language in the description and, that does not matter much for me, as the wrong languages used, usually German or French or Spanish, are ones i read OK but that can't be counted on and  it would be better for me if everything was in English. 

Thanks for any answers.

Edit to add - I had to reboot my Shield for the data to correct. I guess the Shield, and possibly other Android devices keep some local data locally and does not reread the data from the server unless it has to. I did not know that but I can come up with no other reason for the metadata to still be in German after the server showed everything in English. 

Edited April 26, 2025 by Gilgamesh_48

[softworkz 5066]

There are some more good things to say about TV Maze!

Let's start with the one drawback they have opposed to others:

The data is English only, they have no multi-language information.

But the things on the good side are weighing strong:

 

There's no other metadata provider from which we get so much information at once - from a single API call

That's something I had negotiated with them and they made it possible: From a single invocation, we get the complete data for a season, means all episodes, each with complete data. With every other metadata provider, we need to make one call for each episode - with TV Maze, it's just one call for each season. So for example when a series as 4 seasons, each with 25 episodes, we need to make 4 API calls to TV Maze but 100 API calls to every other metadata provider.

The TV Maze metadata provider has a new and different caching approach which makes sure that no unnecessary API calls are made.

 

Advanced Data Update Mechanism

No other metadata service tells you which data has changed  (and needs to be updated) - with all other services, you need to re-query the data for every single item one-by-one, one after another because you have no idea about what's changed and what's not, so you need to re-query.

In Emby's library configuration, that's the setting whether to update metadata regularly ("After the initial import, update ..." - like every 30 days, 60, 90 or never).

That setting exists, because it normally causes a lot of API calls to refresh metadata from those services.
But with TV Maze as the primary provider, you can set this to "30 days" without any worries!

And that's because of the update mechanism. You might have seen the "TV Maze update" task running after re-starting the server (or on interval). It doesn't take long and what happens there is as follows:

• The TV Maze metadata providers sends
  • a list of all the series for which it has/wants data for
  • plus the date/time of the most recent update it did
• Then, TV Maze responds with a list of the series that have changed data since the specified date
• The metadata provider loads that changed data into its cache
• When Emby Server wants to update the metadata for certain items via TV Maze - the provider doesn't even need to make an API call - it already has the latest data in its cache

 

Cache Persistence

The cache of the Emby provider is a disk-cache, not a memory cache, so it survives reboots.

 

So all in all:

TV Maze is the most efficient and economic metdata provider that is currently avaiable for Emby.

 

Edited April 28, 2025 by softworkz

[pwhodges 2012]

Note that TVMaze is very light on anime information.   The few I've checked are all listed, but some are missing special episodes (one is missing a whole season), and nearly all have no season or episode summaries and images.  I've not found any with alternate orderings either, even where the "normal" ordering is meaningless (Monogatari series).

Paul

Edited April 26, 2025 by pwhodges

[softworkz 5066]

46 minutes ago, pwhodges said:

Note that TVMaze is very light on anime information.   The few I've checked are all listed, but some are missing special episodes (one is missing a whole season), and nearly all have no season or episode summaries and images.  I've not found any with alternate orderings either, even where the "normal" ordering is meaningless (Monogatari series).

 

Right - that's a point that also needs to be mentioned. TV Maze has a solid base of data for everything that is of type "common" or "general". 

As soon as it gets more special (not only anime, but also non-English TV for example), data is getting sparse, that's the overall picture. But then, for German TV I can tell at least, even though there's quite a percentage missing, there's also data which none of the others has. It's data apears to be more independent than the others', where it often looks like copied with just minimal changes to the wording applied...

So, for more special libraries, it's rather not the first choice, but it might still be a good 2nd or 3rd option.

Edited April 26, 2025 by softworkz

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

For me right now TV Maze's drawbacks are mostly positive.

1. It is only English and that is my first language and the only one I can read at a glance.
2. It has little anime info and, for me, that means it is less cluttered with, again for me, useless info.

There are other "drawbacks" but it seems nearly every one is actually a positive for me. I do not have multiple TV libraries in the same category so I only use TV Maze in conjunction with my one TV library. I do wish, however, that they also covered movies as I find the other providers to be too wordy in their descriptions and often not accurate but that is mostly minor.

I am just very glad I found TV Maze as it fixes numerous problems I was having with my metadata. 

[Sammy 790]

How do I get TVMaze? Didn't see it in the plugin catalog.

[Happy2Play 9780]

2 minutes ago, Sammy said:

How do I get TVMaze? Didn't see it in the plugin catalog.

It is in the catalog.

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

10 minutes ago, Sammy said:

How do I get TVMaze? Didn't see it in the plugin catalog.

I found it in the plugin catalog row with the metadata providers. Which seems exactly where it belongs, I believe. 

[pwhodges 2012]

1 hour ago, Gilgamesh_48 said:

2. It has little anime info and, for me, that means it is less cluttered with, again for me, useless info.

Presumably it has many  other shows that are of no interest to you - do you consider those "clutter" as well?  You don't have to look at them, so they aren't in your way - you don't even have to know whether they are there or not.

Paul

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

1 hour ago, pwhodges said:

Presumably it has many  other shows that are of no interest to you - do you consider those "clutter" as well?  You don't have to look at them, so they aren't in your way - you don't even have to know whether they are there or not.

Paul

Yes. If i don't have any interest in a show then that show is clutter to me. The fact that I do not have to look at the clutter does not make it any less clutter. But I see that you want to protect you feelings as the only valid feelings so you defend clutter. 

I believe that clutter is much like beauty in that it is in the eye of the beholder. 
I once knew a man who raised warthogs. When I asked why he said it was because they "made the roses look and smell better." 
I do not care what other people think but for me anime and the like are nothing but clutter and, since I do not see it, it does not gain by making other shows better.

But there are clearly people that like anime. I am just not one of them.