Kodi Community Forum

Apologies if this has been asked in some sort of form already, but after an absence for a few years since Kodi 14, I recently purchased a new Media PC and NAS where I have set up my TV series and Movie collection from scratch again. Currently, I have just have two folders "media/movies" and "media/tv-shows", however both contain media files from german and english sources.

To be more precise, I have movie folders which have a german title and some which have an english title:

"media/movies/german movie title/german movie file.avi"
"media/movies/english movie title/english movie file.avi"

This is basically the same for the TV shows (around 90% are english TV series, the rest is german).

I want to use the standard TVDB and TheMovieDB scrapers, but I would like to have the english files scraped (and displayed in Kodi) with the english title and - vice versa - the german titles scraped and displayed in german.

What is the best approach to handle that? And if this is a manual process - moving forward when adding new files - would it be better (I think I read this somewhere ...) to have my files sorted differently? Something like this maybe?

"media/movies/ger/german movie title/german movie file.avi"
"media/movies/en/english movie title/english movie file.avi"

Would love to hear how other users have successfully solved this. Many thanks in advance!

The best way would be to have 4 sources for your media. A suggestion is as follows...

Movies:
media/movies-german/german movie title/german movie file.avi
media/movies-english/english movie title/english movie file.avi

TV Shows
media/tvshows-german/german tvshow title/episodesxxxx
media/tvshows-english/english tvshow title/episodesxxxx

The advantage is that you don't have to remember to keep changing scraper settings for German or English titles.

Also, I would steer clear of TVDB as they are full of bugs after their recent site update. Use TheMovieDB for tv shows.

Many thanks @Karellen ! I will adjust my folder structure accordingly and switch to the MovieDB scraper for TV shows too.

On a sidenote: is there any downside when using the MovieDB Scraper for TV shows than when using the (default) TVDB Scraper? Is the difference just different cover art or does the MovieDB has "less" information for TV shows than the TVDB? What is your gutfeeling on when the TVDB API will be working normal again to use the scraper?

(2019-12-17, 00:01)spinmaster Wrote: [ -> ]is there any downside when using the MovieDB Scraper for TV shows than when using the (default) TVDB Scraper? Is the difference just different cover art or does the MovieDB has "less" information for TV shows than the TVDB? What is your gutfeeling on when the TVDB API will be working normal again to use the scraper?

TheMovieDB-TV Shows is the default Kodi scraper for TV Shows. It replaced TVDB in Nov 2018 after protracted problems with the TVDB site which are still ongoing today. Artwork is of better resolution at TheMovieDB, if there is a downside then it is that older shows may not have the same completeness of data as TVDB.

The TVDB scraper is good to use now, but there are still glitches with the site update. So you might have a good run, or you may stumble on one or two shows. As for progress, the admins are pretty silent, so no idea when.

Hi @Karellen, I still owe you feedback: using this file/folder structure has worked perfectly!

All movies and tv-shows were scraped in the language which I used in the scraper settings and using this structure keeps it much better separated. The reason I wanted and was using TVDB as tv-show scraper was simply because I named my whole file collection based on the data on the TVDB website - way before they were changing their API with all the current issues. And a lot of the data such as "Specials" is not available at TheMovieDB database. Scraping for the tv-shows has worked mostly good, however I ran into a few weird issues for which I will open separate threads though, as this is not related to this thread here.

Many thanks!