I have a library that is well maintained for excellent scraping performance with Kodi, but Infuse seems to be making a bit of a mess of scraping single season TV dramas. I am getting a mix of correct synopsis text with incorrect artwork at the file level.
For multi-season content I have one folder per series with filenames of the form s1e1xxxxx etc, and Infuse generally does ok although it gets muddled if there is a special s00e… file at the main level instead of in a separate Specials folder.
For single series dramas I just have a folder name with the title and episodes are s1e1 etc with no subfolders as there is only one series. Infuse is making a bit of a mess of these.
As I run multiple Kodi clients I am surprised that Infuse does not allow the user to set the content type for a given location, so that you can force TV vs film scraping, and also Kodi doesn’t skip a beat when scraping single series dramas provided the filenames comply to standards and are within a folder designating the program name. But for some reason Infuse is proving to be greatly inferior to Kodi in terms of scraping accuracy.
If helpful I can upload a screenshot or log. I have a lot of single season dramas and I don’t want to have to create dummy season folders for the sake of Infuse as I’ll have to rebuild my Kodi database as well, which is already correct.
Infuse uses folder and filenames exclusively to identify if an item is a movie or TV show. Therefore standardized organization and filenames across one’s library provides the best chance of having the most error-free results.
Here is an example of a singles series folder which Infuse is completely failing on.
The filenames conform to standards and there is only one series in the folder. Kodi hit this one first time.
You’re going to get the best results if you follow the recommended file and folder structure even with one season you’ll get better results if you still have a season folder.
This will eliminate a majority of the errors with other file arrangements.
Having the series name as part of the file will also greatly help prevent errors.
thanks. I guess the Infuse coding is rather more rudimentary than Kodi’s, with Kodi I designate a content type for a storage location, and provided there is a relevant name at the folder level, all subsequent sXeY files are processed correctly, regardless of whether there is a nested folder structure. For the example posted above, a TV adaptation of “And then there were None”, the sXeY elements of the filenames ought to be a bit of a clue that this is a TV adaptation, and the folder name identifies the year to support identification. I think these elements ought to be enough for Infuse to get it right, but I appreciate that as things stand, I’ll need to insert dummy season folders for single-series dramas if I want to improve library accuracy with Infuse.
Adding the series name will also help. I know that Infuse should handle just the s01e01 format but over the years I’ve seen where there was some confusion without the series name so I just adopted the full info and it’s been rock solid since.
Appreciate the tip. For now I’m mainly using Infuse for my dv8 mkvs, so the TV library is mostly irrelevant there but I thought I’d take a look to see how Infuse compares with Kodi. I’m a bit surprised that a scraping system would be designed to filter on name to determine if something is a film or a TV show rather than setting a master library flag to force TV vs Film at a root level, but presumably there’s a reason why Infuse is the way that it is in that regard.
I suppose the downside to something like Kodi is you have to keep your movies in one folder, and TV shows in another - and tag each as a specific content type. If you have happen to move a TV show into a movie folder you would be out of luck.
With Infuse, you just point it at one (or more) folders and it would just sort through and match everything automatically.
The supported naming styles are pretty flexible, but there are a few guardrails. If you didn’t want to rename those specific files you could just place them into a subfolder (with any name) inside the ‘And Then There Were None (2015)’ folder.
thanks. I’ve always found file organisation by content type to be an intuitive thing to do and in no sense a limitation, but I have a better idea now of how Infuse works. However, I have a very large number of s00eX special episode files indexed to thetvdb catalogue, and I think getting these to scrape correctly with Infuse may be a challenge if the episode numbers for specials don’t match between providers, so I may have to let that go.
Yes; converting everything over to TMDB can be a pretty big project depending on the size of one’s library — but in most cases it’ll be something you only ever need to do once.
Batch processing of folder and filenames is very helpful here.
Having begun experimenting with Infuse on Apple devices (having previously managed my media with Kodi for well over a decade), I found Infuse to be a useful enough bit of software that I pivoted my whole import workflow (which Kodi remains a key part of) to best suit Infuse’s installation as the new focal point of my entire video media collection.
Can’t say everyone will be as enthusiastic to make the switch, but I can say I don’t regret doing it.
going forward I’ll bear in mind how I can facilitate dual compatibility across Infuse and Kodi, but unless the Infuse/ATV combo acquires full deinterlacing support for field-interlaced 50i (i.e playback with full 50Hz motion) it’s always going to be a niche tool for me, but I’m interested enough to see how Infuse develops.
