[sixedup]

First post, from a long-term happy but fairly "casual" user.  I have some one-off TV shows (mostly documentaries and special events) that I expected to surface via the TV Shows library. However, where those shows are available on either themoviedb.org or thetvdb.com, they are marked as being "Movies" rather than single episode TV Shows.

Examples; London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony, The Diamond Jubilee Concert 2012, Dave Allen: The Immaculate Selection, Four Wings and a Prayer, The Entire Universe (TMDB thinks its a movie, TVDB thinks its a single episode TVShow!) etc

I can see that it's perfectly valid to categorise all these as movies. After all, what is the difference between a movie and a single episode TV Show, especially as almost everything ends up on DVD eventually? I understand the official advice is to see what the scraper thinks new content is, and then place the content in a Source location so it falls into the correct Library, and is scraped and exposed correctly (according to the Information Provider metadata). The advantage is it's always guaranteed to make everything work, but doesn't help if you don't agree with the information providers fundamental choice of Library, as in this case.

So really what I'm struggling with is how to get Kodi to put content into the Library that I want, rather than what the scraper & information provider have decided.

Clearly I could create all the .NFO files myself (with all the metadata) for each "movie" that I want to represent as a single episode TV Show. Essentially a variant of the instructions here https://kodi.wiki/view/Convert_movie_to_episode. But that means I need to download all the associated metadata and fan-art. And if it changes / gets enhanced in the future, I'll never see it, which feels like a bit of an administrative dead-end ...

I tried creating a "parsing" tvshow.nfo and a minimal episode.nfo containing only the title, and a uniqueid to point to the movie entry in tmdb. That makes the source show up in the TV Shows, doesn't give an error in the Event Log, but doesn't scrape any of the metadata down from The Movie DB, presumably because the scraper is using APIs to look for a TV Show entry, when the provider only has a Movie entry.

So, is there a way to elegantly force content that has "movie metadata" to be represented as a single episode TVShow, that doesn't break the ability to scrape/update the metadata in the future?

[Dumyat]

So, is there a way to elegantly force content that has "movie metadata" to be represented as a single episode TVShow, that doesn't break the ability to scrape/update the metadata in the future?

There was a time where I wanted to achieve exactly the same thing as yourself, ie having my single documentary programmes/movies included in my TV Show library. And like yourself, the only reasonable solution I found was to create a fake NFO file for a single episode programme. Whilst this process did work, it became very labour intensive, particular as a lot of artwork for these single documentaries did not actually exist and needed to be created from scratch. Also, all metadata needed to be manually added to my NFO file for both the TV Show and Episode.
For various reasons, I stopped creating these fake NFO files and now add most of my recorded documentaries broadcast for my region (UK) under 'BBC Documentaries', 'Channel 4 Documentaries' and 'Channel 5 Documentaries' which are all listed on the TVDB with the individual episode details for the exact documentary.

I normally do a quick search in Google of the documentary title, followed by TVDB. Most of the time, results for one of the above 3 TV shows I mentioned are listed and will take me straight to the exact episode on the TVDB. Then it's just a case of adding the documentary under the right season and episode number. If no episode exists, I normally just create a new episode on the TVDB site. I find this solution now works very well for me (even if I did originally want a single TV Show episode in my library). Obviously, this does very much depend on whether the documentary has been broadcast on TV as well.
Maybe there are documentaries filed by broadcaster on the TVDB for your own location? Perhaps this is a reasonable solution for what you are wanting to achieve?

[Karellen]

So, is there a way to elegantly force content that has "movie metadata" to be represented as a single episode TVShow, that doesn't break the ability to scrape/update the metadata in the future?

No.

[sixedup]

So, is there a way to elegantly force content that has "movie metadata" to be represented as a single episode TVShow, that doesn't break the ability to scrape/update the metadata in the future?

No.

Very succinct! I hope the info Dumyat has given me will be enough to solve my problem, but at least its good to know I didn't miss anything out. Thanks!

[sixedup]

Thanks dumyat - I hadnt realised those "series" existed on TVDB. Will do some work and testing to get it working, but from a quick glance, it looks very promising, and I think it should cover almost all the standalone TV content that I have.

[Karellen]

Very succinct

Yep, just a simple answer to a simple question

You can also separate your content into "Documentaries" using Smart playlists (wiki) and Custom home items (wiki), then filter them out of your movie listing.
But I think Dumyat's solution is better.

[sixedup]

Just to close this off, Dumyat's solution worked really well, probably because like him I'm a UK resident, and the UK documentary channels on TVDB seem to be very well defined. But it was interesting to see that (for me at least) the TVDB scraper subjectively did a better job on all my TV Show collections than the default TMDB scraper had been.

The only item in my collection that I've not been able to "fix" is a 3+ hour copy of the original broadcast 2012 London Olympic games opening ceremony, as the only metadata that seems to exist is for the edited DVD version (as a Movie). I guess I can live with that, and if I can find some time I'll look into maybe adding it myself

Thanks for your help - much appreciated.

[Karellen]

Thread marked solved.

[Dumyat]

Just to close this off, Dumyat's solution worked really well, probably because like him I'm a UK resident, and the UK documentary channels on TVDB seem to be very well defined. But it was interesting to see that (for me at least) the TVDB scraper subjectively did a better job on all my TV Show collections than the default TMDB scraper had been.

Yeah, I generally find the TVDB is still more accurate than the TMDB for TV Shows. I know there were some issues with the TVDB scraper 2/3 years ago, but I stuck with it as my preferred scraper of choice for TV Shows.

Glad my suggestion worked out well for you. I do sometimes find some documentaries may not be listed under 'BBC Documentaries' but may be listed under programmes like 'Storyville', 'Horizon' or 'Timeshift' which all broadcast single documentaries as well on the BBC, but may not be advertised under the actual TV Show name on the guide data. 

From memory, I think there is also a series called 'BBC Music' or 'BBC Sounds' for music related Documentaries/Rockumentaries. But sometimes, these are just filed under the regular BBC Documentaries.

Maybe there is also a BBC Sports series as well for the your Olympics 2012 opening ceremony.

[sixedup]

I ended up with content split across "BBC Comedy", "BBC Documentaries", "BBC Horizon", "BBC Music", "ITV Documentaries", "Channel 4 UK Documentaries" and "Channel 5 UK Documentaries". Some strange splits in the BBC content - eg some music and comedy stuff in "BBC Documentaries" - but with a bit of digging everything I had was there - except that London Olympics ceremony.

There was a decade-old post in the (now locked) TVDB support forums about adding Olympics content, but the admin seemed to have vetoed it - looks like at the time they had been through some bad experiences with syndicated streams and didn't want to go through it again. See https://forums.thetvdb.com/viewtopic.php?t=10655 and https://forums.thetvdb.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=10643

Since then they seem to have agreed how they will treat the Olympics coverage (see https://support.thetvdb.com/kb/faq.php?id=91) and there are entries for Rio (2016) and Tokyo (2020). Will look into what might be involved in starting to add some of the content for London, and whether its something I could contribute.