Metadata providers for episodes, some issues and suggestions

[jant90 15]

I recently changed the order of my metadata providers for TV shows and now I prefer The Movie Database (TMDb) over TheTVDB. I did this mainly because I found out that TMDb greatly improved their service lately with a brand new, modern website but mainly because nowadays they also support TV shows and they support high res images. Compare that to TheTVDB with their decade old design and where currently I can't even load their main webpage because "Could not connect: Too many connections" (other then that message the page is blank).

 

However ever since the change a lot of episodes don't receive ratings anymore. This is probably because TMDb doesn't have a rating for those episodes while the TheTVDB does have them (as TheTVDB still has a bigger user base I guess) but I would expect Emby to automatically fetch the rating from the next metadata provider if it's missing from the first, but that doesn't seem to happen. However, I also realize that episode ratings are usually pretty meaningless (also when they're from TheTVDB) because there are simply not enough votes per episode and so they are in fact meaningless metadata. Therefore (suggestion 1) I would like to see an option to disable ratings for episodes entirely. Another thing I noticed is that for many episodes IMDb has way more ratings than either TheTVDB or TMDb or even than both of them combined. So, (suggestion 2) would it be possible to fetch ratings from IMDb for episodes like you already do with movies? And/or, (suggestion 3) maybe even calculate a weighted average rating from all metadata providers combined to make ratings more meaningful?

 

Another thing I noticed while rearranging my metadata providers is that for fetching season images TMDb is not an option, strangely it's the only option as season metadata provider. In order to get high res season posters I now prefer FanArt over TheTVDB as image fetcher but (suggestion 4) I would love to see TMDb as image fetcher for seasons as well.

 

Thanks for reading, if you have any thoughts about these suggestions I would love to hear them!

[Happy2Play 9782]

2)The IMDB rating is coming from OMDB so, you would have to make OMDB a higher priority provider TV ratings also.

 

4) Season images on TMDB come from "TheTVDB Bot", so they are the same as TVDB, unless a user has added custom images only to TMDB.

[Luke 42080]

@@jant90, #4 is already available. Have you explored server metadata settings?

[Happy2Play 9782]

@@jant90, #4 is already available. Have you explored server metadata settings?

Sorry @@Luke

TMDb as image fetcher for seasons as well.

Only Fanart, TVDB, and plugin option TVMaze are available Image Fetchers for Seasons.

 

[Luke 42080]

My mistake, sorry.

[jant90 15]

Thanks for the replies guys and apologies for my late reply.

 

2)The IMDB rating is coming from OMDB so, you would have to make OMDB a higher priority provider TV ratings also.

 

4) Season images on TMDB come from "TheTVDB Bot", so they are the same as TVDB, unless a user has added custom images only to TMDB.

2) Alright, I quickly tested refreshing the metadata of an episode with OMDb as top metadata provider. But no new data was fetched. However I'm not sure if that happens because there are still issues with the API (see message on their homepage). But take IMDb ID tt5734400 for example, on IMDb it has 89 votes already but when entering that ID on the omdbapi.com it returns N/A for rating. Also no plot is returned while there is one on IMDb so I'm not sure what's going on there and if it's smart to make OMDb the preferred provider for episodes.

 

4) I believe they initially imported everything from TheTVDB, including episode images and such. But they have lots of high res images besides the ones imported from TheTVDB for episodes already. And I also spotted some high res season posters for recent seasons. So maybe they use another source as well? And even if they don't I would expect that over time we're gonna see more and more high res season posters from their userbase so it would make sense to include them for season posters as well.

 

 

Now that I've ran this setup for a while I notice that often low quality episode images are available quicker than the high res ones. And as I add new episodes very shortly after they aired they usually receive the low quality images (basically just badly taken screencaps from TheTVDB). So this got me wondering if would be possible to automatically upgrade the fetched images as soon as a higher res image becomes available. Currently these higher res images are not fetched by Emby because the item already has image metadata so Emby doesn't check for new metadata anymore (I'm guessing). Is there a way to make Emby automatically recheck metadata for "new" content, let's say keep checking for new metadata and images during the X days after adding the content to Emby (that makes suggestion 5 I guess)? A kind of metadata rechecker during the first X days of newly added content would also be very useful to get more meaningful ratings, as recently aired episodes generally receive new ratings from users during that period. (Question 6) would I perhaps be able to force a metadata refresh (including images) for recently added episodes (max. X days old) using the API?

 

Another question (7), also image metadata related, is there a way to stop Emby from using images attached inside mkv containers (embedded images)? Certain release groups seem to do this and sometimes Emby uses one of the attached images as the primary one, only when image fetchers have none I think. It looks like this (yuk!):

 

 

Thanks again guys!

[Happy2Play 9782]

Did you see the dozed topics saying OMDB is down, see here.

[Luke 42080]

Hi @@jant90, the best thing to do is use the default settings and we'll do the work of selecting the best providers for each media type. By default, Omdb is not prioritized first for episodes.

 

As far as embedded images go, that is only a last resort, they are only used when internet images are not available. But I suppose it's possible we could introduce a setting at some point.

 

Yes TMDB has some nice season/episode images, they are community contributed. Does this help answer your questions?

[jant90 15]

Did you see the dozed topics saying OMDB is down, see here.

Yeah, I was aware of that (I also mentioned it in my previous post), but testing the API directly with a specific IMDb ID of a TV episode (one that I mentioned in my previous post as well) I got a response from their API, however it contained no rating or vote count at all, while there was one on IMDb. Just now (no more problems reported on the OMDb homepage) I tested a few more recent TV episode ID's and none of them have ratings. I have no idea why this is, are they still in the progress of scraping all that data from IMDb since last weeks problems? Or do they require a minimum amount of votes before they even list the IMDb rating and vote count? Or do they only refresh the metadata they scrape from IMDb once every few weeks perhaps? If it's one of the latter two then the problem of Emby not refreshing metadata arises again. Episodes that are added to the library shortly after they aired will never get the IMDb rating because they are not available through OMDb yet and Emby doesn't refresh at a later point.

 

It was your suggestion to prefer OMDb as metadata fetcher for episodes in order to get IMDb ratings, but because of the details explained above that simply doesn't work. I guess that was (and is) my point.

 

Hi @@jant90, the best thing to do is use the default settings and we'll do the work of selecting the best providers for each media type. By default, Omdb is not prioritized first for episodes.

 

As far as embedded images go, that is only a last resort, they are only used when internet images are not available. But I suppose it's possible we could introduce a setting at some point.

 

Yes TMDB has some nice season/episode images, they are community contributed. Does this help answer your questions?

 

Well, by default TheMovieDb is disabled as image fetcher for episodes while they have the highest quality images, so maybe the defaults need to be reconsidered and adjusted as metadata providers have changed over time?

 

As the embedded images are a last resort I'm guessing I'm only seeing them because there were no images available at the metadata providers at the moment the content was added. But when I manually refreshed those items a few days later high res images were fetched, so I would like to re-emphasize my suggestion: if Emby would be able to refresh metadata (and upgrade images in the process) the "problem" would fix itself and I would automatically receive high res images as they become available.

 

Again, I'm just looking for solutions to make the metadata of my library more complete and meaningful and when I hit walls in my ability to do I tried making some suggestions that I hope to be considered for future releases. For example that's why I did the suggestion of either improving the episode rating (by properly getting it from IMDd for example) or giving users the option to hide episode ratings altogether (= more meaningful metadata).

 

Thanks again for reading and developing the great software that Emby is!

[Luke 42080]

The defaults are there because users want fast library scan. My suggestion for you is defaults + enabling TMDB image provider for seasons.