Follow TMDB's genre grouping for TV shows

Continuing the discussion from Plex TV Genres shown Incorrectly:

I don’t know how recently TMDB combined their “Action & Adventure”, “Sci-Fi & Fantasy”, and “War & Politics” genres … but since TMDB is the only place where Infuse pulls TV metadata from … it’s about time Infuse fixed its bug of not being able to process the ampersand in TV genres pulled from TMDB.

TMDB Bilbe: TV Genre & Keywords

There is absolutely no reason for Infuse to separately display “Action & Adventure” as both “Action” and “Adventure” — two seemingly different genres but containing identical contents. Nor should it separately display “Sci-Fi” and “Fantasy” and “Politics” and “War”.

I mean, I wish TMDB didn’t combine the pairs. While there are distict differences between action and adventure, and ever greater difference between Sci-Fi (pew! pew!) and Fantasy (abracadabra!) and Politics and War … TMDB doesn’t care … and so Infuse users are stuck combining them. Infuse pretending the categories are distinct, when they aren’t (according to TMDB), is a nasty tease and a waste of screen real estate.

@james … Can you check on this? Thanks.

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It looks like the movie genres at TMDB are still separate for those “combo” genres in TV.

I hadn’t really noticed it since I personally don’t look at genres much in TV but do use them in movies.

I would have thought it would be far simpler for TMDB to use just the one set of genres for both movies and TV with the separated ones to make searching uniform and easier. :man_shrugging:

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TMDB doesn’t separate the TV genres. Everything “Action” is “Action & Adventure” and everything “Adventure” is also “Action & Adventure”.

Same for the other two pairs.

Downloading XML via Kodi from TMDB, you’ll see unique line items for each genre (or pair of genres) as indicated on the bible page I linked.

For example, a show might be tagged with each of the “Drama” and “Mystery” and “Action & Adventure” genres at TMDB. That’s three points of information — not four. Infuse interprets the ampersand as the third data point actually containing two distinct pieces of information. This is incorrect. Infuse should not display separate “Action” and “Adventure” genres because there is only one genre — “Action & Adventure”. Everything viewable when you click “Action” is exactly what you see when you click “Adventure”, and vice versa.

The two buttons each present the same lists. Only one is needed. The redundant second (of each pair) is doubly bad UI — first, because both buttons do the same thing, and second, because the user is misled into thinking if they click on the “Sci-Fi” button they’ll be spared shows that are straight up fantasy, and if they click on “Fantasy” they’ll be spared shows that are hard sci-fi with no fantastical elements. But that doesn’t happen; because TMDB doesn’t make that distinction.

TMDB, for example, also doesn’t think “The West Wing” has anything to do with War & Politics. I click on the solo “Politics” genre and I’m expecting to find “The West Wing” or “Servant of the People” or maybe “Last Week Tonight” and “The Newsroom”. But that’s not how TMDB works.

And we’re stuck with TMDB.

This is a bigger issue with TV, because unlike with movies, Infuse doesn’t respect the genre tags in our local .NFO files for TV content.

If I’m annoyed by the genre assignments TMDB gives to my movies (like sporadically and inconsistently identifying movies as “TV Movie” genre), I can edit my .nfo files to delete that reference in the XML (and then refresh my library metadata) and that genre will no longer appear. Or I can add genres I invent on my own (such as “Marvel Cinematic Universe”). Not as easy as giving us the option to hide unwanted genres in the UI (longpress > hide) or create our own … since you need to bulk edit every title … but still workable.

No such workaround exists with TV content. This is a shame.

The bigger shame is the TV genres are broken out of the box, because Infuse is tripped up by TMDB including ampersands in a few of its defined genre fields.

Updated the thread title and category for clarity, and to hopefully catch the attention of @james .

Brief summary:

Three of TMDB’s approved television genres (of which there are exactly 16) contain an ampersand — they are “Action & Adventure”, “Sci-Fi & Fantasy”, and “War & Politics”.

Infuse incorrectly displays these three composite genres as if they were actually six distinct categories. There is not an “Action” genre for television (according to TMDB); nor is there an “Adventure” genre. There is only “Action & Adventure”.

Nor are there distinct “Sci-Fi”, “Fantasy”, “Politics”, or “War” genres. There is only “Sci-Fi & Fantasy” or “War & Politics”.

Please fix this. Thanks.

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@james

Noticed this was marked as “researching” a while back.
Have you … or anyone else here … been able to confirm this weirdly isn’t just me?

Can I hope it will be fixed in the next update? :crossed_fingers:t3:

Hey, @james … is the ampersand bug with Infuse’s splitting and duplicating TMDB’s “Action & Adventure”, “Sci-Fi & Fantasy”, and “Politics & War” TV genres (each into two different but identical lists) getting addressed in 7.4?

Technically this is not a bug, but an area which could potentially be improved. Nothing planned here for 7.4 though.

Not a bug? How so? The TMDB genre is “Action & Adventure”. There is no “Action” genre, nor is there an “Adventure” genre. There is only “Action & Adventure”.

Yet Infuse displays separate “Action” and “Adventure” genres. Both lists are the same. This is clearly wrong. And this is repeated for the other two such TMDB genres.

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It’s not quite that simple.

Making this change wouldn’t be hard, as Infuse is already storing these genres in the DB. After fetching metadata, the genres get split and shown in the library.

My main concern is inconsistency with other metadata sources - local override, Plex, Emby/Jellyfin, where genres don’t always match TMDB.

For example, if someone has multiple sources set up you could end up with even more genre categories.

  • TMDB Genre: Action & Adventure
  • Possible Plex/Emby/Jellyfin/NFO Genres: Action, Adventure

With merged genres, Infuse will show three sections in the Library: “Action,” “Action & Adventure,” and “Adventure.”

Merging media server genres is not the best option either, as it might be a random combination of any of them, each shown separately.

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Thanks for the detailed response.

Okay, I can see that being an issue for users who look beyond just using Infuse for library management. Still, given that most users, including all of those who depend exclusively on Infuse for library management and on Infuse’s chosen exclusive metadata provider (TMDB) for metadata, are currently left with an experience that looks (absent detailed explanation) to be a clear error with Infuse, the present state of affairs seems rather undesirable, as new vanilla Infuse users would never understand why the display of TV genres are “broken” out of the box.

I’d think the solution lies with compelling those using alternative metadata sources (which unlike TMDB perhaps properly distinguish between “action” and “adventure”) to manage their genres fully through their third-party media servers.

The default experience in vanilla Infuse certainly shouldn’t be to misrepresent the information provided by Infuse’s chosen and exclusive metadata provider.

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Regarding local override of TV metadata:

It is possible to override TMDB derived TV genre metadata through local .nfo files? So your saying if I changed the TV genres locally from “Action & Adventure” to “Action and Adventure” they would no longer be duplicated?

If so, is it sufficient to change the genre in the series level tvshow.nfo file alone, or must it also be changed on a per-episode basis? (The difference for me being 300+ tvshow.nfo files vs. 10,000+ episode .nfo files to keep track of).

One immediate problem I see maintaining this override scheme being anytime I add new episodes to an effected TV series, the local series-level tvshow.nfo metadata gets overwritten with fresh data sourced from TMDB; which will wipe out any of my previously “fixed” genre edits.

7.4 is so nice. But this burns my eyeballs. :sob:

Seems I’m the only one incredibly annoyed by this.

That makes me sad.

Someone give the first post a sympathy heart for me, would ya?

Didn’t you tell me that it doesn’t matter if I change the television genres in my local .nfo because Infuse still doesn’t support genre tags in television .nfos? I’m confused how local override with therefor confuse things.

Because if local override can rid me of the duplicate genres, I’m all for putting in the work.

Appreciate you clarifying this point. Thanks!

Since I was notified that this thread was recently untagged as “researching” by @james and my question about local override was never addressed, just figured I’d remind you that this feature is still BROKEN for users who know nothing but Infuse. And that’s clearly just wrong-headed.

FLskydiver is 100% bang on. I’m brand new to Infuse and my 1st impression was that either I’m doing something wrong, or there is a bug. Infuse is turning 1 genre into 3, which renders searching by those genres unusable right out of the box.

I’m using a Plex server, and the default there is “Action/Adventure”, as opposed to “Action & Adventure”. If the fix for this issue requires me to conform to TMDB and change to “Action & Adventure” instead I’m happy to do that… easy to do.

However, Plex is able to use “Action/Adventure” AND “Action & Adventure” AND “Action” AND “Adventure” all at the same time as 4 distinct separate genres with no problem, so it’s obviously possible.

Curious… in Infuse it works properly for movies, so why can’t it work for TV shows?

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Currently, this works as intended. Infuse break out grouped genres into individual genres.

I can understand the case for keeping these grouped, so have adjusted this thread’s title and moved it to suggestions.

Fair enough … maybe it’ll get more traction there. First like secured. Top-thousand most-liked suggestion list membership imminent! :pensive::grimacing::crossed_fingers:t3::rofl:

Is there perhaps not a way to identify if users are using third party media managers, and only splitting the TMDB TV genres if that is the case?

Or only splitting the genres if Infuse detects additions to its database of non-TMDB-sourced split genre metadata that would result in having both an “Action & Adventure” (TMDB) genre next to an “Action” (non-TMDB) genre?