Edit TV show metadata?

Not been able to find a solution for this, hoping someone on here can help (don’t find the Kodi forum so useful).

All my TV show episodes are correctly named so that scrapers match correctly. But the scrapers can be caught out on specials, eg the unbroadcast Dr Who Shada is matched, but the air date seems to be imputed as 1969, 10 years before the episode was made. I cannot find a way within the GUI to fix this, and it messes with the year shown at the season level.

Can this be fixed within the GUI? (I default to Estuary). Or do I have to dive into the SQL database?

Most likely you will need to dive into the epgdb database file

It cannot be fixed inside of the GUI. The options for fixing it outside of manually editing the SQL would be fixing it at the scrapers source web site (which would benefit others as well), or making a .nfo file with the corrected information in it.

I find that if specials are named with the correct episode number for the scraper i’m using and I use the s00exx format, they always scrape exactly as they should (ie s00e01.whatever.mkv).

Shada may be a bad example. That should probably be scraped as a movie and linked to the TV show rather than be added as a special. This is preference though.

thanks for the suggestions. I’ve been able to fix this.

My Shada file was named correctly for the scraper, but because there is no air date at source, somewhere along the way an air date of December 1969 is imputed. This suggests to me a coding oversight in how Kodi manages missing dates, as it then led to the wrong year in the season display view.

Anyway, at first I tried creating an nfo file from scratch, but then I realised I could export my entire library to separate nfo files, from which I simply corrected the air date for the relevant title and reimported, that way I still had the scraper’s correct metadata for everything else + thumbnails.

This led me to think it would be nice if Kodi had an option for title-specific nfo export. In any event, the export feature gave me the foundation I needed to work with, so the .nfo tip paid off, thanks.

There are third party solutions that provide this function such as TMM.