58-beta1 migrates to TMDB for show data

Announcements
1

Update 2020-03-05: 58-beta5 is out, fixing the (auto) backup issue.

  • :hammer: Resolve (auto) backup failing if lists or movies are missing some properties.
  • :hammer: Notification selection: show empty text only if list is empty.
  • :memo: Latest translations from crowdin.

Update 2020-03-05: 58-beta4 is out, fixing more crashes.

  • :wrench: Allow adding show with duplicate TheTVDB ID if the TMDB ID is different. Background: TheTVDB recently started combining shows that are still separate on TMDB. TMDB may then link to the same TheTVDB ID.
  • :hammer: Do not crash if show fallback response failed.
  • :hammer: Limit episode search results to 500 to avoid crash.
  • :wrench: Report auto backup errors.

Update 2020-03-04: 58-beta3 is out, fixing more crashes.

  • :wrench: Seasons and episodes that are not on TMDB are now removed from shows. This should be a better user experience, e.g. it avoids errors when setting watched on Trakt.
  • :hammer: Resolve crash when downloading not watched/collected episode info from Cloud.
  • :hammer: Do not fail update if a show can not be found on Trakt.

Update 2020-03-03: 58-beta2 is out, fixing crashes.

  • :hammer: Resolve crash when adding show without run time info.
  • :hammer: Resolve crash when downloading not watched/collected episode info from Cloud.

With this update SeriesGuide uses https://www.themoviedb.org (TMDB) for show and episode data. This required some significant behind the scenes changes to the database and various parts of the app.

So, there will be bugs!

Note: An intentional bug is that Cloud sync no longer updates the last watched time of a show, if you mark an episode watched on another device. This will be fixed with version 59, once data should be migrated for most people.

Notable changes in this beta release:

  • :star2: Show data is now powered by themoviedb.org (TMDB). Your shows need to update before some
    functionality, incl. Trakt or Cloud can be used again. Shows or episodes not available on TMDB
    currently remain in your library, but functionality is reduced (e.g. no Trakt or Cloud support).
  • :star2: Share a TMDB show url to SeriesGuide to add a show (support for TVDB URLs was removed).
  • :wrench: Lists can now only contain shows. Note: use the backup tool to export your season and episode lists.
  • :wrench: Allow longer check in messages.
  • :memo: Extensions API has changed: uses TMDB IDs. Developers see https://seriesgui.de/api/
  • :memo: Latest translations from crowdin.

View the full change log on GitHub.

This beta is only available on the Google Play Beta program. Learn how to join at https://github.com/UweTrottmann/SeriesGuide/wiki/Beta.

Thank you everyone, for testing, translating, giving feedback, sending in bugs or contributing!

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2

Uwe, help me understand here. Are we saying that in the backend of the app, the data for show times, description, and episode names is NO LONGER being pulled from TheTVDB, but TMDB? Do we know if TheTVDB has a sync with TMDB, or should we (as editors) make any edits to TMDB exclusively?

3

Yes, the app (no backend) fetches data exclusively from TMDB and Trakt now. Trakt itself uses TMDb info (and some others to get show release time IIRC).

Also see the updated https://seriesgui.de/help#sources

Edit: data is not synced between TheTVDB and TMDB.

4

Does this mean IMDb links are removed? While I trust TMDB has good data, the gold standard of IMDb is my go-to for actor info.

5

I get an error when Autobackup is activated. Only error so far. Question : to update everything, I have the option on the top of the screen (update…manually). Does updating continue if my screen turns black? I think it doesn’t, but how can I know?

6

Trakt can’t even handle renames of seasons in TVDB, how are they going to manage a migration to TMDB? I can already see how I have to migrate stuff per hand or lose half of my trakt history…

But SeriesGuide seems to also not really work well right now. Countless shows have Seasons that don’t exist in trakt because they still use TVDB. So I end up with lots of broken data. Not really optimal…

1 Like
7

Seasons and episodes that are not on TMDB are now removed from shows. This should be a better user experience, e.g. it avoids errors when setting watched on Trakt.

I’m going to have to strongly disagree with this update. I may have just lost a number of shows and I have no idea. This is very, very bad and not in any way a better user experience.

At the very least, please consider adding a Trash Can or Removed Shows folder somewhere so we can see if any shows get removed during the transition. I personally don’t care if Trakt doesn’t work. But I care a great deal if app data is lost!

2 Likes
8

The migration code does not remove any of your shows. If it can’t find a TMDB ID for a show, that show will remain in your database. If the TVDB ID is linked in the future on TMDB it will get migrated and updated again.

SeriesGuide will only remove seasons and episodes of shows that it found a TMDB ID for and these do not exist on TMDB.

9

What error message do you get?

10

If the IMDB ID is linked on TMDB, yes, SeriesGuide still tries to fetch it for a show.

11

Made a screenshot of it.

Screenshot_20210304_205038_com.battlelancer.seriesguide.jpg
Screenshot_20210304_205038_com.battlelancer.seriesguide.jpg480×768 76.2 KB

12

Thanks! Another user has reported this as well. I can’t find the cause so the next beta has additional error reporting that should help me find it.

13

Only error I found. Did a complete sync & download, everything worked fine (had to add seriesguide to exceptions in Huawei energy management, cause that terminated the sync every time). Looks like for most series there is data, I’ll just have to add some posters for Belgian series.

Turned off Autobackup for now.

Greetings,

Kris

14

Got a similar error, just with long instead of int.

15

Backup problem solved with latest update. Did a manual sync of everything after the update. But it is necessary to log out of seriesguide cloud, and log back in. Then sync with tmdb starts.

16

Syncing with seriesguide cloud is sometimes a problem. A progress counter would be nice. Had to log in and out a couple of times due to errors. Now I can log in and out without errors, and without a long syncing period. But there still is a problem with some episodes that don’t exist on tmdb. They are still present in seriesguide, but I get a message"can’t communicate with seriesguide cloud" if I want to mark them as read.

17

Just some general feedback to the change: While it worked fine for pretty much all western series, there seem to be a lot of differences for Animes which caused quite some to get their progress either reset or even wrongly assigned. Some of the issues I’ve seen:

  • TVDB has different seasons while TMDB only has one big season => Season 1 progress is migrated, all episodes in later seasons are reset. This mainly happens for large, long running animes like DragonBall, One Piece and so on
  • TVDB has subsequent seasons in the main entry while TMDB has multiple series => All progress to later seasons is lost. One example for this is the Fafner series
  • TVDB and TMDB have Specials in different order => Apparently it is tried to match the different specials. Sometimes this works and the proper status is assigned to the same special but sometimes this fails and the status is assigned via Index. This leads to the same specials getting wrong statuses. Eg if I had a series with three specials, the first (Special 1) being watched, the second (Special 2) being skipped and the last (Special 3) having no status on TVDB and TMDB has the order Special 2 => Special 3 => Special 1 suddenly I have watches SP2, skipped SP3 and no status is assigned to SP1. This is partly caused by TVDB having movies as specials while TMDB does not have them at all
  • In general it happens from time to time that single episodes can’t be matched and get no status assigned, haven’t found any common denominator between those though

Alltogether the migration worked better than expected, however with my 400+ series even those small discrepancies mean a lot of work to check what exactly happened. So it’d be nice to have some sort of overview to see where issues might have occured.

Best regards,
Jones

18

You can log in to trakt, there you can find a comparison between your shows on tvdb and tmdb. https://trakt.tv/transition/tmdb/my/airing?trakt_id=xxx. Replace XXX with your trakt ID. Don’t know how often everything is synced, and synced to seriesguide.

19

Thanks for your detailed feedback and observations! I’m aware of these issues and I don’t have a really good automated solution to split shows or differently grouped episodes. This is why I originally never wanted to move to TMDB. But now it’s either bite this bullet or let the app die. With more time I probably could write a manual migration tool, but I opted for an automated approach to meet the deadline of the TheTVDB API shutdown.

Also, originally the app left the episodes that could not be migrated (e.g. additional seasons not on TMDB). But that was confusing users, so the before last beta changed that to remove any episodes and seasons not found on TMDB.

20

Are there still bugs in beta 5?