The TVDB Metadata Processing Suggestions

[EnterNoEscape]

Since I'm already in the code and updating this invaluable plugin for SageTV to use The TVDB v3 API, I decided to explore a few other things that always bugged me about the metadata coming in from that source.

The big one for me is the fact that SageTV doesn't appear to render the Unicode smart quote characters (e.g. ‘ ’ ‘‘ ’’) correctly. What I end up seeing in the UI is a smart quote with a large space after it. To be honest, since there's a lot of inconsistency with smart quotes, I would rather they all be converted to their not smart equivalents. I can't recall if there are custom filters you can add that would be able to weed this out on a per user preference basis, but I wanted to open a discussion about things related to how we get information about TV shows and see if there's any appetite to improve things or if we are generally fine with how it all works today.

[Tiki]

I’m not sure how deep you are going, but my biggest complaint about metadata and fan art handling in Sage has been that it doesn’t distinguish between shows and movies with the same name but different release dates. Also, IMBD searches for a show sort matches only by how closely the title matches, but don’t consider the original air date (so often the top matches are wrong).

[EnterNoEscape]

A Movie and a TV show with the same title shouldn't be a problem since fan art is stored in seperate paths for Movies and TV. However, noted about the lack of release dates to distinguish between fan art with the same title and different year shows. I think this might have been discussed before. It seems like it would be fairly easy to implement (especially since you can actually specify the name of the folder you want to be used for fan art for that specific title), but I'm sure I'm missing some important details.

Interesting. I had not noticed that IMDB was ignoring the year. In my collections, it has always got the year right for movies and I have a few with 3 remakes from various years.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

A Movie and a TV show with the same title shouldn't be a problem since fan art is stored in seperate paths for Movies and TV. However, noted about the lack of release dates to distinguish between fan art with the same title and different year shows. I think this might have been discussed before. It seems like it would be fairly easy to implement (especially since you can actually specify the name of the folder you want to be used for fan art for that specific title), but I'm sure I'm missing some important details.

Interesting. I had not noticed that IMDB was ignoring the year. In my collections, it has always got the year right for movies and I have a few with 3 remakes from various years.

If I recall the matching code in phoenix will try to use the year if is known, and, I think it will even use a tolerance for the year. Basically it finds a title match and if more than 1 match and it knows anything about the year, then it will try to further reduce the matches based on the closest year. If it doesn't know the year, then it will just use the best match.

I think the problem is that the fanart directory is just the name of the show or movie without the year. So, in those cases, while phoenix might find the right fanart for each, it actually stores it in the same named folder in the fanart directory.

The fanart storage is pluggable, so, in theory you could create a new fanart storage plugin that know how to separate the fanart into folder that include both the title and year.