Loss of metadata after switch from tvdb to tmdb

I was hoping the tmdb announcement was that infuse was now looking at both tvdb and tmdb, but it seems like tvdb has been dropped. Unfortunately that means some series that had metadata now don’t. For me the high profile example is Formula 1. I organised and renamed all my files after metadata was added to tvdb last year and now it’s all gone.

I see there were discussions about switching that I missed, but I wish we had the choice in product or fallback to tvdb if tmdb doesn’t have content, otherwise there will be regressions like this. :frowning:

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Sorry for the trouble.

Are you seeing issues other than Formula 1 races?

Unfortunately, TMDb does not support live sports at this time, but this could change in the future.

I haven’t gone through my whole collection, but I know tvdb had entries for F1 and the other events they run at race weekends (F2, F3, Porsche Supercup) and I have all of those too.

So is there no hope for a fallback to tvdb for shows without tmdb metadata?

4 posts were split to a new topic: RiifTrax series missing on TMDb

It’s really very frustrating… I manually added some older German series in TVDB and spent a lot of time to do that (for the episodes, the artwork, searching for release dates, …). Now all is lost…. I would also like it if you could choose between TVDB and TMDB by myself.

This change was a really stupid idea. A lot of TV shows that I have on my system have broken metadata. Either the show isn’t recognised at all, or the episode numbering is screwed.

Like others I spent time organising my files so that the correct metadata was downloaded from TVDB. Now I have to do it all again.

Did someone test this before release? If so, the testers didn’t do a very good job.

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I understand the frustration, and for that I apologize.

There was extensive testing done over multiple months both internally and with external beta testers, however with the number of titles we’re dealing with (over 100K series and nearly 3M episodes) it makes testing every single use case virtually impossible.

For the most part TMDb is very comparable to TheTVDB, but there are some organizational differences between them. TMDb has a slightly stricter moderation policy, which helps ensure their data is accurate and matches up with other external sources of truth. We’ve also seen a few case where TheTVDB may have a series added which isn’t actually a TV series, and these may be categorized as movies on TMDb.

If you are able to provide a few specific examples of series you are having issues with then we can try and assist.

Since the change to TMDV I’ve lost artwork for two TV shows:

  1. The city uncovered (The City Uncovered - TheTVDB.com)

  2. How drugs work (How Drugs Work - TheTVDB.com)

Also the first season of Miami Vice has now 22 episodes as opposed to 23 on TVDB which messes up all the info on the individual episodes. The problem lies in TMDB considering the first episode as only episode 1 whilst on TVDB is episode 1&2. That makes the info on all other episodes be off by one.

Another thing that is messed up since the change to TMDB are the user ratings.

Give it about a day, and info for these should pop up.

The episode count here is a little tricky though it looks like IMDb also has 22 episodes instead of 23 listed. In general, TMDb is going to be pretty consistent with IMDb, and since Trakt is also moving to TMDb, using their episode ordering will allow Infuse to continue syncing with Trakt.

Infuse was previously using ratings from Trakt (as TheTVDB did not provide ratings) but now is using only ratings from TMDb. You can of course still rate items and sync those to Trakt.

And the NBC website also shows 22 episodes and as the orginator that may be a better indicator.

You may want to join the first two files into one if you have them seperate.

Thanks guys for the quick response.

Just one more question, is there a way to keep getting the ratings from Trakt or IMDb as the ones from TMDB are really, really bad?

Cheers.

Great idea!

We moved away from using Trakt ratings in 7.1, but would love to hear about issues you are seeing. The door is always open for moving back, if it makes sense.

The issues I’m seeing with the ratings are mainly two:

  1. Inconsistent ratings. The ratings in TMDB are very different than the ones from Trakt or IMDb. These are the two series I’m watching at the moment:

Miami Vice

In TMDb there are episodes rated as 1.0, others as 2.0, others as 3.0. etc meanwhile at Trakt the lowest rating for an episode is 6.4. Also notice that Trakt has Season 1 as 23 episodes, same as TVDB and Wikipedia.

Veneno:

Again ratings for episodes in TMBd are all over the place.

  1. Lack of ratings. A few examples:

Wild China

Cocaine Coast

Salamander

There’re many more cases like this in my library.

One other thing. Can you please edit the backdrops for Episode 15 of season 1 of Miami Vice in TMDb? As you can see the bot added two images of what it seems the movie “Cleopatra” and I don’t know how to delete them

Cheers.

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Good info, thanks. It may make sense to move back to Trakt ratings (at least for TV shows).

Good catch…that’s a little weird.

AFAIK, there isn’t a way to delete incorrect artwork as a user (it would need to be flagged/report for a mod to deal with). However, if you’re logged in you can upvote and downvote images. Infuse will always grab the top-rated image.

I was able to do this for this image, and it’s now the top rated item and it should update automatically in Infuse within the next day.

Yes, I agree. I think moving ratings for TV shows back to Trakt is a good idea.

Thanks a lot for your help.

Didn’t like too.My TV shows and Documentaries became a mess.I agree.Stupid idea.

@james How are things going now? Is there any chance we can get TVDB back in some way?

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Some additional info on the reasons for the switch, as well as some info on addressing any issues can be found in this thread.