Issue fetching metadata for TheTVDB entries with episode 00

Hello,

I found a german series which contains seasons which don’t start at episode 01, but episode 00 instead. See here: https://www.thetvdb.com/series/270574/seasons/official/2004
Infuse however doesn’t recognize the pisode like it does with all other episodes. The file is in the same folder as all the other episodes of this season, which are detected fine, and is called like this:
S2004E00 - 01.01.2004.mp4

Infuse recognizes it as “Other”, although everything else seems to be fine. I’d guess that the episode 00 is the problem here. Any tips how to handle that, or does that need to be fixed on Infuse side?
Best Regards.
Timtam

Not an Infuse problem, it looks like thetvdb made an error for that special. I can’t read german so you may want to check the list of “Specials” https://www.thetvdb.com/series/270574/seasons/official/0 and see if any of the first couple match the episode with “00”

If it does, you can change it from s2004e00 to s00eXX to match the episode number in the specials.

You could also join thetvdb and bring this up in their forum and maybe get it straightened out that way. This would also help others who may run across this series/episode issue. :wink:

Hi,

thanks. Its not in the Specials season yet and it wouldn’t make much sense to put it in there, since the Special episodes seem to be ordered by year and since this particular episode is rather old, it would be necessary to add it almost right at the beginning of the Specials season. Same goes for the season itself, you could of course re-number all the entries within Season 2004 to start with 01 and go all the way up to the last episode instead of starting with episode 00, but then again it would mean that anyone using TheTVDB to properly tag their database would get their library messed up when pulling the next metadata update.
I understand that its not Infuse who’s at fault here, but would it be a big problem to allow Infuse to start numbering episodes with 00 instead of 01? This particular German series is a special snowflake, but its not impossible that its not the only one and from a developer’s point of view it doesn’t seem to be that problematic to change that small piece of code. Just saying ;).

Best Regards and Thanks :).
Timtam

Not sure if you noticed but there are a few specials that aren’t labeled with a year and those were the ones I was wondering if it was the same as the 2004 00 episode. Sorry I don’t read german but isn’t part of that “00” episodes name “Special” so wouldn’t it fit in specials?

Also, this is the first time in the years I’ve been using thetvdb that I’ve seen an episode “00” for any series. It really doesn’t make sense to me to re-write the software to accommodate a single tv episode. It may also be part of the API that Infuse uses to request data from thetvdb so that means both Infuse and thetvdb would have to rewrite software to accommodate this one instance.

Please note, this is just my opinion and I don’t work for either company but I think it’d be more productive to at least bring it up on thetvdb forum to see if they had an easy fix to make it correct.

I checked those and its not part of the Specials season yet. The page contains the dates when the corresponding episode first aired, and the specific one we’re talking about (S2004E00) aired on January 1st 2004. It would make more sense to have it as episode 01 of the 2004 season though, its not really a special. Its actually pretty complicated to say so because that series is an on-going series with no particular order, so you can theoretically watch this episode right after all other episodes, but TheTVDB decided to order by date, thus forcing this episode to be the first for this season, and since it aired out of plans (means not at the usual weekly date), they might have considered it a Special, without flagging it as such by putting it into the correct season.

You’re right. I’m not familiar with the TheTVDB API, I’m just pretty sure that the Infuse-internal naming algorithm uses some regular expressions or some sort to search for the popular naming schemes, which would have ment that it would require just a little tweak to include episode 00 as well. But we’re talking about curing the symptoms here instead of finding the source of the issue, but since fixing that on TheTVDB side would mean regressions for people already having this series on their hard disks somewhere, it seems like there is no “correct” solution here.
I could go ahead and adjust the season ordering for that season myself right now, but I guess you’re right and discussing it on TheTVDB would be the best way to go. Let’s see if that helps, if I don’t forget it i’ll probably check their forum out tomorrow.

Best Regards.

Timtam

Just did a search for E00 on thetvdb forum and it appears that it’s only happened a limited number of times and they are correcting all of them. If you want to see some of the forum threads you can paste “E00 site:thetvdb.com” without the quotation marks into Google search and it will give you the 18 results and most if not all show where the mods and admins corrected this.