Hey all. I’ve just installed OSMC and let it loose on my media library (several terabytes of TV shows and one terabyte of movies). I’m having a couple of rather serious problems, though, and they’re all connected to the scraper.
First, the scraper is misnumbering TV episodes, sometimes dramatically so. Most likely this is because TVDB is numbering episodes in a different order than I do. Normally this wouldn’t matter, since I just want to use the Videos menu anyway, but even when browsing Videos it still displays only its guess instead of the filename.
Case in point: Disney’s DuckTales. My files list “Scroogearello” as episode 1x15. TVDB, and Wikipedia, list it as episode 1x47. Most likely my file source misnumbered the files … but it still means my files are getting mislabeled in the TV Shows and Videos menus, so I can’t tell which file is which.
Even worse, sometimes it misidentifies a show completely. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1983) was misidentified, and mislabeled, as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012).
Second, as far as I can tell, the scraper is crashing OSMC whenever I try to exit. Nothing else is running at the time and I’ve removed every add-on but MyOSMC, and nothing’s happened. When I select “Exit” off the Power menu, the system hangs about four times out of five.
My files may be in a different order than TVDB’s a lot of the time, but they’re well-named and identified. If I could just get it to stop scraping and just display my filenames I’d be fine (I mean, that’s what I’d been doing for years before setting up a media center). But I can’t find any options that seem to allow it. Surely I can’t be the only one who’d be happy just seeing their filenames under Videos?
Yes you can add a source that is not scraped. Just remove the source you already added, making sure that you say yes to removing the items from the library (otherwise they will be orphaned and difficult to remove) and then re-add the source, when choosing the type of media (movie, tv shows, music etc) there is an option “none” which means that directory will be accessible via Video->Files but it will not attempt to scan it into the library.
For mis-numbering of episodes try using “XEM” as your TV scraper instead of the standard tvdb.org scraper. It’s not in the default list but if you choose to “get more” scrapers you’ll find it available in the defalt Kodi repo under scrapers. A classic example of the problem you describe is American Dad - which has two alternative numberings, I find that with tvdb the numbering is totally wrong, but XEM gets it right.
TV episode scraping is based entirely on the season and episode numbers in the file name - the actual name of the episode is ignored. So if your episodes have the right names but wrong numbering then the Library entries will be incorrect. (But try the suggestion of XEM as the scraper to see if that helps)
If the wrong version of a movie or TV show is picked up as in the mutant ninja turtles example, the one that was matched wrong needs the year in parenthesis adding to the name.
For a TV show the name of the folder that contains the shows is what matters, the filenames don’t matter. (Except for season and episode numbering) So you would rename the folder “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1983)” and it should detect it correctly.
For a Movie it’s the naming of the Movie in the file (not any folder that it might be within) that matters. This is contrary to how TV Shows are handled.
There has been extensive debate and requests on the TVDB forums to correct this, but they are adamant that their enumeration of the episodes is correct and have locked some series to prevent any such changes.
The funny thing is XEM still indirectly pulls all its data from the tvdb.org database (description, artwork etc) but applies an episode and season number translation in the process to convert the season numbering from tvdb.org numbering to the numbering everyone else uses
Not all TV Shows need episode number translation so those ones pass directly through without change. So you get the full catalog of shows from tvdb.org but those whose numbering are wrong get corrected.
I find that having my folders named correctly is the easiest way in the long run, but I understand that you don’t want to jump in with both feet with such a huge library.
If you do end up using the scrapers at all in the future and run into a problem where something’s been detected incorrectly you can refresh the info via the context menu and it will ask you to pick the correct match without having to rename any files. That won’t work for SxxExx mismatches, though.
