just an off-topic and hint for useres with similar scraper issues.
I have the complete Smallville (2001…) series and tried hard to make the scraper (tmdb) find and replace the information for S01E01 to S01E06. The scraper found Intelligence series for the first episodes (for whatever reasons).
After digging and reading and testing, the best solution for me was to add tvshow.nfo files with themoviedb.org http links to the season directory (many thanks to kodi for this feature):
Smallville (2001)
Smallville (2001)
Season 1
Smallville_S01E01.mkv
Smallville_S01E02.mkv
…
tvshow.nfo
The series is stored on a NFS share. For any reason, the scraper was unable to read all the files: The log
2021-12-02 08:08:10.601 T:1807721344 NOTICE: VideoInfoScanner: Starting scan …
2021-12-02 08:08:10.640 T:1807721344 WARNING: No information found for item ‘nfs://192.168.0.113/home/Shared/Video/Smallville (2001)/Smallville (2001) Season 1/’, it won’t be added to the library.
2021-12-02 08:08:10.641 T:1807721344 WARNING: Process directory ‘nfs://192.168.0.113/home/Shared/Video/Smallville (2001)/Smallville (2001) Season 1/smallville_S01E01.mkv/’ does not exist - skipping scan.
The strange thing is "…does not exist " although the file is there. Possibly an issue with spaces in name?
Allthough I got some episodes info correctly, for others I got no information.
Finally I used a nfs mount instead of the Kodi one to run the scraper on and, voilà, the scraper found the correct info. The nfs mount was done with a read/write account. I do not know, what Kodi nfs did (a gust account?).
I had to switch every wrong directory and file to “Local information only” and then back to “The Movie Database” to get the right information for seasons and episodes.
BTW: this was all done with LibreElec but I will switch to OSMC, as LE does not offer Kodi 19 for this Raspberry 3 installation.
From your description I think what you had happen was the root folder “nfs://192.168.0.113/home/Shared/Video/Smallville (2001)/” for some reason got set in Kodi’s database with either missing or incorrect TV show source information. Perhaps something like having a tvshow.nfo sitting there with a link to tvdb when your scraper was set to tmdb thereby breaking the scraping process. Kodi’s online scraping works by associating a link to the online information for a particular show to a folder. Once it has done that it ignores by default any subfolders (ie season folders) and then just tries to figure out sxxexx so it knows what info to grab for a particular file.
By switching your source to a system mount you are starting a different file path and as such if you have wrong info in your Kodi path you now have a new chance at getting it correct as Kodi will see this as something new.
I’m not sure about this, never heard of someone doing this, and I don’t feel like testing it, but I think by adding tvshow.nfo files for each folder you might be telling Kodi that it should treat each season folder as a different show root folder. Essentially saying there is different scraping info for each season so seven different metadata source links in the database for this show where normally there would just be one. This should never be needed or desirable.
You didn’t actually say what you had in your nfo files (parsing, full, ???) but I would have to think that the real issue is either something is wrong with your nfo files or else you put a movie source path in the same subfolder as your TV shows. Does this “Video” folder contain only TV shows and not any other type?
As for shows that are not scraping correctly the way to deal with it optimally is to bring up the information window in the library and then choose the “refresh” option there. I would think that if you did that with your smallville and told it to scan all and yes to ignore local info then it would work correctly even without any of the nfo files.
thanks for your information. For me it looks like Kodi is unable to read the mkv files. Possibly these Kodi log entries are missleading and should be "…unable to find info for ".
I put in the http links for Smallville Seasons as found at themoviedb web site (all de, german) in the tvshow.nfo files. One link in one tvshow.nfo per Season. Example:
h**ps://www.themoviedb.org/tv/4604-smallville/season/10
(replaced tt by **)
inside the subdir
Smallville (2001)/Smallville (2010) Season 10/
I switched then to local information only and back to TMDB afterwards and then did a Refresh Information. That worked for me.
If I do a manual refresh, TMDB scraper is unable to find the Smallville series, it either comes up with nothing or different Smallville films or series.
And, yes, I have films and series inside a main Video folder. Therfor I change the content of each folder manually to “Series” for folders with series inside.
BUT, do I need to rename the folders, as the tvshow.nfo for the main subdir has
…
Staffel 1
Staffel 2
…
The names “Staffel” instead of “Season”.
And, although I wrote all tvshow.nfo inside the Season’s folders with the htpps link only. Most of them are now replaced by xml data.
This would be the main issue as this is never a supported way of running Kodi. You should remove [some path]/Video as a source and split your files such that you can setup new sources something like… [some path]/Video/TV/ [some path]/Video/Movie/
No. If you were scraping the normal way then Kodi completely ignores whatever the subfolder is called. The only reason to have one is for personal preference, Kodi doesn’t care or use the name of these folders in any way. If Kodi was trying to scan one of the season folders as if it was the main root of a specific show then it may look at that to figure out the TV show name, but using the parsing nfo bypasses this as well.
I think you pretty much just have a mess due to having mixed media and the scrapers do not cope with this well. As such you managed to find a path where you could get a show to show up with a bunch of effort but your hacking your way around a problem that wouldn’t exist if you were running your sources in a recommended way. You may want do some reading on Kodi’s wiki to find out more details…
many thanks for the clarification. I will consider this on my next setup.
OTOS I used the Add Library feature in the context menu for the folder and specify ‘this folder contains’ with Movies or Series, as I did for Smallville.
I see that scraping and getting the right back is not that easy. Already applied for TMDB and got my developer’s API key to play around with tmdb queries.
Now that I want to switch to OSMC (Kodi Matrix), I need to check for the HW acceleration, as video playback is stuttering whereas it runs smoothly with Libreelec (Kodi Leia). I already found a forum entry for that and need to check.
I really like OSMC, especially my IR Remote setup was easy. But I am missing VNC. The vnc-install script somewhere for OSMC breaks the sound output and puts weired entries in config.txt. :-(. VNC runs smoothly with LibreElec. But vnc is not a must.
If your media is stored and named using best practices and you setup Kodi in a recommended way then scraping for most content should be automatic and problem free without any nfo’s, tweaking scrapers per folder in Kodi, or any other kind of mucking about including needing any kind of account on the scrapers site or API key. There does exist some cases where you have to take care when a show shares the same or similar title (ie “The Flash (1990)” vs “The Flash (2014)” vs using just “The Flash”), but outside of that problems should be rare. If not, then something isn’t setup correctly.