Unfortunately this hasn’t been my case.
On a positive note, it worked for Dragon Ball Super (by selecting ‘Air Date’ and it’s now structured into seasons/arcs instead of all in 1 season) but it’s absolutely not worked for Naruto (DVD Order, not air date - I haven’t even tried Shippuden yet). I’ve formatted the filenames accordingly but it’s not picking anything up. Maybe I’ve got the wrong file name format and that’s on me but no variation of anything works. What’s more annoying is that TMDB has Naruto working just fine.
The reason I wanted to try tvdb for Naruto instead was I’ve read through multiple threads on TMDB where mods have stated that their intention with anime is for everything to just be 1 big season (yes, even One Piece with 1000+ episodes) so my aim is to move away from TMDB entirely for anime, the problem is that Infuse doesn’t look anywhere else other than local metadata. I can fix Naruto over the weekend easily enough by reverting back to TMDB’s formatting and scrape/save it locally to avoid surprise changes down the road. I keep backups anyway.
The headache I’m noticing is that there’s no consistent formatting rule on TMDB. It’s not like we’re talking about an eclectic unknown anime either - we’re talking the big 3. Naruto only has 220 episodes but it was a nightmare to format until I realised that the seasons just continued the episode number - meaning instead of ‘S02E01’ (like you’d assume) it’s ‘S02E53’ (chronologically episode 53 is the 1st episode of Season 2) which I’d be fine with if this was a consistent rule but it isn’t. It’s the rule Naruto & Shippuden followed when they were made by a moderator and now can’t be edited (and even if I can edit it, I’d break other users libraries in the process). One Piece follows this rule but Dragon Ball Z doesn’t (but is at least seasoned) whereas Dragon Ball Super is just 1 season of 131 episodes. Attack on Titan is mostly correct but it incorrectly lists the last 2 episodes of season 4 as specials as they were released that way, chronologically its season 4 though. For newcomers that don’t know that (because you know, they’re new) means they either have to go digging and risk spoiling things or they simply miss out. Sure, running a media server is a hobby at this point so chances are, none of us are new. It’s not a cohesive, headache-free or ‘simple’ experience though.
The point of Infuse’s metadata fetching is to automate the process; if we have to manually collate from 3 different sources or use third party applications then it isn’t seamless. I understand that Infuse isn’t directly at fault here because it’s the inconsistent enforcement of TMDB’s rule structure but Infuse exclusive uses TMDB. I wouldn’t even care if anime relied on a different community database as long as it’s correct. Infuse could easily fix this though by allowing you to flag what episode group (order) you’d prefer the app to follow (it even allows you to create episode groups, meaning if the one your after isn’t present then you can make it and others get the benefit).
Ultimately I don’t care what I actually have to use or rely on, I just want it to work and stay fixed. The fact we have to go to this extent is a joke to me though, for people like my GF who has no technical ‘know how’ it’s tough and it comes the way it’s served.
TLDR; It looks like it works… sometimes. I’ll try a few options but otherwise revert Naruto to TMDB whilst that’s still somewhat correct (even though Shippuden isn’t).
The solution might just be to use TinyMediaManager to scrape the data and then tweak the season/episode structure to your preferred format in the app afterwards. I hate sounding grouchy and making out that this is a big deal, I’ve just been fighting with this for well over a year now so I’m a tad fed up.
Sorry guys 