TV Show Scraper Help

[yeahletsnot]

MrMC (3.8-1 Git:2019-04-16-60d492d-dirty). Platform: TVOS ARM64 64-bit.

Im using TheMovieDB are source for TV data.

20:31:40.161 T:6165934080 WARNING: No information found for item 'smb://192.168.1.170/f/Friday The Animated Series/', it won't be added to the library.

So I update the folder title to "Friday The Animated Series (2007). Still no luck. Below link shows its within the DB.

https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/13004-fri ... uage=en-US

How does one make this work? Can I add an .nfo file inside the folder which the scraper will reference?

Also, pros and cons of TheMovieDB vs TheTVDB?

[DocEagle]

For TV shows I would prefer „The TVDB“.

https://www.thetvdb.com/series/friday-t ... ted-series

[yeahletsnot]

Thanks. But why?

I’m sure they both have there merit.

[DocEagle]

It‘s up to you, of course. But in my mind TheMovieDB is mainly specific for movies, and TheTVDB is best for TV shows. I guess that‘s the way it started originally.

As for scraping you don‘t have to create .nfo-files by yourself. You find various descriptions in the web for „scraping TV shows“ in KODI. The most important thing is how you organize your files and folders, e. g.

Friday - the animated series
Season 1
Friday - the animated series S01E01
Friday - the animated series S01E02
...

Then you don‘t have to do anything more manually. The rest will be done by the scraping process.

[yeahletsnot]

My issue is with the scraper picking up the TV show... let alone how I have the contents arranged.

But you will find TMDB and TVDB has pretty much the same content. What differs is the art.

And as per the above the folder is labelled as per guidelines.

So I am wondering how does the software query and take that string and compare to the folder string it grabs?

[DocEagle]

You tell the software to do this either by your setup (settings / video / library / update library on startup) or explicit by triggering manually via context menu (calling the information from inside media sources for movies and Tv shows resp. scanning for new content in case of existing show episodes). I assume you know about the basics of KODI.

Basing on your content description (folder resp. file name) the software executes a database query against TVDB or MovieDB or whatever you defined before. The attribute for the query is your file name (TV show and episode # or the movie title).

I hope I did get your question right.

[yeahletsnot]

Thanks. But I understand how to initiate an update.

Reference my first post where I provide log data of a scrape happening but the string grabbed by MrMC not being found when it queried the database.

I think provided a link to the TV show as proof that it should have been found and that my naming was the same (minus ":" which is an illegal char).

Below is something i grabbed from Kodi doco... not sure how reliant it is..

* The TV Show folders are located inside the Source folder.
* The folder name will be cleaned of commonly used strings, such as DVDRip, 1080p, x264, etc. before being passed to the scraper. If the year of release is included, this will be extracted and used by the scraper to assist in making a match.
* Spaces, periods, or underscores may be used to separate words in the folder and file names, but should not be mixed. Note also the issue with Split-episodes regarding file names with periods.


Naming TV Shows follows the same guidelines as for Movies.

* Name the TV Show folder the same way as shown on the TV Show page at the scraper site.
* It is always best practice to include the year along with the title. This makes scraping more accurate and differentiates between original and remake versions.
* This guideline also applies to Country of Origin TV Shows. For example Hells Kitchen (UK), Hells Kitchen (US), Hells Kitchen (AU), Hells Kitchen (IT) etc.
* The title and (year) displayed at the scraper site is how you should name your show.


The best practice method is detailed in the image to the right. (season folders are optional)

* Angel (1999)- TV Show folder containing Single File episodes

[DocEagle]

I‘m afraid I can‘t help you further. I usually don‘t have any problems with scraping TV shows. In case your naming is wrong or not unique you‘ll get a list of alternative proposals, from which you can select the desired one.

In case your naming is unique, you‘ll see the correct hit and you finally select it, that‘s it.

If you don‘t get any suitable hit, then you either have to check your naming (don‘t care about special characters as colons or hyphens, because they won‘t get taken into the query), or maybe the database is offline (happens from time to time) or even not fully updated.

[yeahletsnot]

I‘m afraid I can‘t help you further. I usually don‘t have any problems with scraping TV shows. In case your naming is wrong or not unique you‘ll get a list of alternative proposals, from which you can select the desired one.

In case your naming is unique, you‘ll see the correct hit and you finally select it, that‘s it.

If you don‘t get any suitable hit, then you either have to check your naming (don‘t care about special characters as colons or hyphens, because they won‘t get taken into the query), or maybe the database is offline (happens from time to time) or even not fully updated.

I’ve had a few shows that aren’t unique. Never been promoted to select which.

Is this some TestFlight beta feature?

[DocEagle]

I’ve had a few shows that aren’t unique. Never been promoted to select which.

Is this some TestFlight beta feature?

As far as I can tell from my user experience, this is more likely a clue for the fact that the query didn‘t get any result. That means your naming should be wrong or the show isn‘t yet in the database at all.

Maybe you should give an example.