Movie and TV scrapers broken

Hi

I’m still running OSMC 18.9 on a Pi 2 which up until now has been working fine until recently when I noticed scraping via The Movie Database has stopped working.

I thought the API has probably changed or something, although curiously one of the requests that apparently returns empty results is:

https://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/movie?api_key=f090bb54758cabf231fb605d3e3e0468&query=Up&year=2009&language=en

which I can grab via curl quite happily from the Pi.

This is what I’m seeing in the logs for scraping Movies and TV shows respectively;

2026-08-18 23:38:13.112 T:1661984992   DEBUG: VideoInfoScanner: Scanning dir '/home/osmc/Videos/Films/Arrival (2016)/' as not in the database
2026-08-18 23:38:13.115 T:1661984992   DEBUG: CAddonSettings[metadata.themoviedb.org]: loading setting definitions
2026-08-18 23:38:13.115 T:1661984992   DEBUG: CAddonSettings[metadata.themoviedb.org]: trying to load setting definitions from old format...
2026-08-18 23:38:13.116 T:1661984992   DEBUG: CAddonSettings[metadata.themoviedb.org]: loading setting values
2026-08-18 23:38:13.123 T:1661984992   DEBUG: FindMovie: Searching for 'Arrival' using The Movie Database scraper (path: '/home/osmc/.kodi/addons/metadata.themoviedb.org', content: 'movies', version: '5.3.0')
2026-08-18 23:38:13.160 T:1661984992   DEBUG: scraper: CreateSearchUrl returned <url>https://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/movie?api_key=f090bb54758cabf231fb605d3e3e0468&amp;query=Arrival&amp;year=2016&amp;language=en</url>
2026-08-18 23:38:13.161 T:1661984992   DEBUG: CurlFile::Open(0x5accc600) https://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/movie?api_key=f090bb54758cabf231fb605d3e3e0468&query=Arrival&year=2016&language=en
2026-08-18 23:38:13.176 T:1661984992   DEBUG: Get: Using "UTF-8" charset for "https://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/movie?api_key=f090bb54758cabf231fb605d3e3e0468&query=Arrival&year=2016&language=en"
2026-08-18 23:38:13.227 T:1661984992   DEBUG: scraper: GetSearchResults returned <results></results>
2026-08-18 23:38:13.227 T:1661984992   DEBUG: FindMovie: Searching for 'Arrival' using The Movie Database scraper (path: '/home/osmc/.kodi/addons/metadata.themoviedb.org', content: 'movies', version: '5.3.0')
2026-08-18 23:38:13.229 T:1661984992   DEBUG: scraper: CreateSearchUrl returned <url>https://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/movie?api_key=f090bb54758cabf231fb605d3e3e0468&amp;query=Arrival&amp;year=&amp;language=en</url>
2026-08-18 23:38:13.230 T:1661984992   DEBUG: CurlFile::Open(0x5accc600) https://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/movie?api_key=f090bb54758cabf231fb605d3e3e0468&query=Arrival&year=&language=en
2026-08-18 23:38:13.244 T:1661984992   DEBUG: Get: Using "UTF-8" charset for "https://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/movie?api_key=f090bb54758cabf231fb605d3e3e0468&query=Arrival&year=&language=en"

2026-08-18 23:40:05.398 T:1661984992   DEBUG: VideoInfoScanner: Scanning dir '/home/osmc/Videos/TV/Bluey Minisodes/' as not in the database
2026-08-18 23:40:05.400 T:1661984992   DEBUG: VideoInfoScanner: Found episode match /home/osmc/Videos/TV/Bluey Minisodes/Season 1/Bluey.Minisodes.S01E01.Burger.Dog.mkv (s1e1) [s([0-9]+)[ ._x-]*e([0-9]+(?:(?:[a-i]|\.[1-9])(?![0-9]))?)([^\\/]*)$]
2026-08-18 23:40:05.401 T:1661984992   DEBUG: VideoInfoScanner: Found episode match /home/osmc/Videos/TV/Bluey Minisodes/Season 1/Bluey.Minisodes.S01E02.Bingo.3000.mkv (s1e2) [s([0-9]+)[ ._x-]*e([0-9]+(?:(?:[a-i]|\.[1-9])(?![0-9]))?)([^\\/]*)$]
2026-08-18 23:40:05.401 T:1661984992   DEBUG: VideoInfoScanner: Found episode match /home/osmc/Videos/TV/Bluey Minisodes/Season 1/Bluey.Minisodes.S01E09.Government.mkv (s1e9) [s([0-9]+)[ ._x-]*e([0-9]+(?:(?:[a-i]|\.[1-9])(?![0-9]))?)([^\\/]*)$]
2026-08-18 23:40:05.401 T:1661984992   DEBUG: VideoInfoScanner: Found episode match /home/osmc/Videos/TV/Bluey Minisodes/Season 1/Bluey.Minisodes.S01E10.Drums.mkv (s1e10) [s([0-9]+)[ ._x-]*e([0-9]+(?:(?:[a-i]|\.[1-9])(?![0-9]))?)([^\\/]*)$]
2026-08-18 23:40:05.402 T:1661984992   DEBUG: VideoInfoScanner: Found episode match /home/osmc/Videos/TV/Bluey Minisodes/Season 1/Bluey.Minisodes.S01E11.Browny.Bear.mkv (s1e11) [s([0-9]+)[ ._x-]*e([0-9]+(?:(?:[a-i]|\.[1-9])(?![0-9]))?)([^\\/]*)$]
2026-08-18 23:40:05.402 T:1661984992   DEBUG: VideoInfoScanner: Found episode match /home/osmc/Videos/TV/Bluey Minisodes/Season 1/Bluey.Minisodes.S01E12.Whirlpool.mkv (s1e12) [s([0-9]+)[ ._x-]*e([0-9]+(?:(?:[a-i]|\.[1-9])(?![0-9]))?)([^\\/]*)$]
2026-08-18 23:40:05.402 T:1661984992   DEBUG: VideoInfoScanner: Found episode match /home/osmc/Videos/TV/Bluey Minisodes/Season 1/Bluey.Minisodes.S01E13.Strong.Potion.mkv (s1e13) [s([0-9]+)[ ._x-]*e([0-9]+(?:(?:[a-i]|\.[1-9])(?![0-9]))?)([^\\/]*)$]
2026-08-18 23:40:05.403 T:1661984992   DEBUG: VideoInfoScanner: Found episode match /home/osmc/Videos/TV/Bluey Minisodes/Season 1/Bluey.Minisodes.S01E14.Robo.Bingo.mkv (s1e14) [s([0-9]+)[ ._x-]*e([0-9]+(?:(?:[a-i]|\.[1-9])(?![0-9]))?)([^\\/]*)$]
2026-08-18 23:40:05.409 T:1661984992   DEBUG: GetEpisodeList: Searching 'https://api.themoviedb.org/3/tv/256953?api_key=6a5be4999abf74eba1f9a8311294c267&language=en&append_to_response=content_ratings,credits,external_ids,images&include_image_language=en,en,null' using The Movie Database scraper (file: '/home/osmc/.kodi/addons/metadata.tvshows.themoviedb.org', content: 'tvshows', version: '3.6.0')
2026-08-18 23:40:05.451 T:1661984992   DEBUG: CurlFile::Open(0x597b3430) https://api.themoviedb.org/3/tv/256953?api_key=6a5be4999abf74eba1f9a8311294c267&language=en&append_to_response=content_ratings,credits,external_ids,images&include_image_language=en,en,null
2026-08-18 23:40:05.468 T:1661984992   DEBUG: Get: Using "UTF-8" charset for "https://api.themoviedb.org/3/tv/256953?api_key=6a5be4999abf74eba1f9a8311294c267&language=en&append_to_response=content_ratings,credits,external_ids,images&include_image_language=en,en,null"
2026-08-18 23:40:05.471 T:1661984992   DEBUG: scraper: GetEpisodeList returned <episodeguide></episodeguide>
2026-08-18 23:40:05.472 T:1661984992 WARNING: No information found for item '/home/osmc/Videos/TV/Bluey Minisodes/', it won't be added to the library.

End of the road? :frowning:

Fixed it by installing and using “The Movie Database Python” and “TMDb TV Shows” scrapers.

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Is it possible to remove the “broken” scrapers? There doesn’t appear to be an option in the UI, and when I tried manually deleting the plugins from the .kodi directory, they were listed with “Update available” against them after I rebooted :thinking:

Those XML scrapers are exceptionally old, and they were removed in newer versions of Kodi. With Kodi 18, they were still part of the core build and are in the repo for that version of Kodi. There’s not really a practical way to delete them.

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