theTVDB fail

[Gripweed]

Silly me, I started looking at my logs. I found a number of TVDB fail notices such as the examples below. Basic questions - is it just a failure of TVDB or VAP? Shouldn't the naming information be able to be gotten from the metadata of the .WTV files? Actually right after the log shows a failure message it gives the exact information (in all cases) that would be used to do the renaming. Where is this info coming from? TVDB? WTV metadata? In all examples it shows "Failed get one series match" but with the Passage example it also states "2 episodes had same air date". Upon manually checking The Passage entry on TVDB, there was only one episode for that day. Help!

Examples in attached file...

 

[dlflannery]

The TVDB searches are failing because they aren't given an acceptable set of keys. The series name and at least one of the following keys is needed:
episode name
original air date
season and episode numbers

It appears your WTV metadata has the season/episode combined into the episode name, e.g., "s02e02 This Is America". It would have to be just "This is America" to match the episode name in theTVDB. Thus the TVDB search fails.

Your meta-renaming could succeed if you didn't include {epnum} and {seasonnum} in the renaming template. It would insert the combined episode name (e.g., "s02e02 This Is America") in the location of (eptitle) in the template.

The "2 episodes had same air date" failure for Passages occurs because there are English and Spanish versions of that series airing with exactly matching Series- and Episode titles and on the same air dates. VAP has no logical basis to choose one over the other so calls it an error. How many other series produce this error message? Also the WTV metadata is providing incorrect original air dates for series like For The People that aren't currently in original production and airing. I'm assuming you are not using input file name parsing to get metadata, correct? (i.e., the WTV metadata is the only source for metadata keys for the TVDB search.)

 

[Gripweed]

I started off reading your reply and got very confused. My confusion came mainly because I didn't understand the whole process behind Metadata and TVDB when it came to VAP. I hadn't realized about the season/episode combined with the episode name. Thanks for pointing that out. I used ToubMetaReader to look at some of the WTV files (not the ones mentioned in my examples). All had the "Subtitle" showing the S/E combined with the episode name. The "Title" was listed just as the episode name. So, I thought that VAP was feeding the "Subtitle" to TVDB rather than the "Title". On second thought, VAP is feeding both "Subtitle" and "Title" and all is well except for the combining in the "Subtitle". I record probably on average 6-8 shows a day (almost all for my wife) but I only had one failed TVDB search every few days so this really confused me as to why only a few were being rejected. Putting that aside, the S/E combining with the episode name rang a bell with me. EPG123 (which supplies the Schedules Direct EPG to Windows Media Center) has a setting to do that in the Metadata. I checked and I had it set to do that and so I turned that off. We'll see where that takes me. Probably that should cure the TVDB fails. I'll know better tonight after the evening recording sessions.

As far as the incorrect original air dates, yes, that's been a long standing problem. It seems that the problem shows up most often on PBS shows as they use a great many previously aired in Britain BBC and ITV(?) shows. Other channels are bringing in previously aired British and Canadian shows, too. I'm not really worried about that as I don't mind dealing with that on an individual basis.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by input file parsing? Is that found in the advanced settings and deals with {wildcard}, {wildcard2}, etc.? I'm confused on how that works as well now. The thing is that (until maybe when I turned on the wrong option in EPG123) everything I had set up in VAP just worked. I never had to fiddle with it after you initially offered the setting and I set it up based on your examples then. It just worked and I left it alone and forgot what the settings meant or were there for.

Eventually I hope to turn off VAP's episode/movie renaming and run Filebot as a separate renamer. I use it now manually and I hope to have the process all scripted up in the future. The only problem is that the author of Filebot is a genius at writing complex command line procedures and scripts but is lousy at teaching the basics.

 

[dlflannery]

Metadata can be obtained from (suitably formatted) input file names using templates set up on the “Metadata Templates” tab of Advanced Configuration. This is based on regular expression matching and requires that metadata tags be contained between fixed text elements that delimit the text that is matched by the tags. Note the instructions shown there. The parsed data overrides whatever you get from the embedded file metadata.

For an input file name such as "For the People_WNEPDT_2019_03_07_22_00_00" you can parse out the series name, callsign and date with a template like this:
{title}_{callsign}_{year}_{month}_{day}_
However this can't improve your TVDB searches because you already get the series name and (recorded) date from your WTV metadata.

 

[Gripweed]

I'm trying to remember whether WMC only has the default file name format such as "For the People_WNEPDT_2019_03_07_22_00_00" or whether that can be changed. I'll take a look around the settings after I'm done with this message.
I made the change with EPG123 and now the Subtitle is just the episode name and not the season/episode number plus the episode name. I'm not totally convinced that that was the cause of the TVDB fails. Too many files did not fail while it was set up that way. I did find the reason for the failure of Empire and For the People searches. The TVDB wanted the search based on Empire (2015) and For the People (2018) and not non-yeared names. I added those to VAP's filename translator and they should be fine in the future.