Fallback to English for "Episode X"

Hi,

TheTVDB allowed empty episode names for other languages (e.g. german).
TMDB does not allow it, it will fill the episode name with “Episode 1” and so on.

This results in many lists of “Episode 1”, “Episode 2” … for several series, where the german language is not maintained (yet).

Uwe: Could you implement a fallback to English / the alternative language (or, if easier, to the series´ original language), when the episode name of the prefered language is “Episode X”, as it does for empty entries (of TheTVDB)?

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Thanks for reporting. Do you have an example show to test this with?

Yes, here:

Defying Gravity


As you can see, TMDB itself falls back to the english (or original?) name.

Or this one, “Dumbest Stuff On Wheels” has no german translation at all:

Same for:

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(Another problem, that TVDB has empty episode names and TMDB has the default “Episode X”, is, that Trakt will not migrate to TMDB because of different episode names, e.g.: https://trakt.tv/transition/tmdb/shows?trakt_id=76881

EDIT: I opened a new topic for this in the Trakt forum:
https://forums.trakt.tv/t/tmdb-migration-treat-empty-tvdb-episode-name-as-equal-to-episode-x-of-tmdb/6880 )

Das gleiche ist auch bei The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, The Blacklist

Bei “The Blacklist” aber nur bei der aktuellsten Staffel 8. Die anderen Staffeln sind bereits in Deutsch vorhanden.

Ja, genau. Betrift meist (bei meinen) immer die neuste Staffel.

Hi @uwe is there any update on this issue?

I took a look at TheTMDB’s API and I found this. You can get a JSON with all available translations, so these are my suggestions:

  1. Check if my language is in that JSON: if it’s not, then fallback to my alternative language or show’s original language.
  2. Check if the JSON has my language but records are partially/fully empty, if so then partially/full fallback as explained before.

I can provide some useful examples:

  1. records for Spanish or French exist but they are empty
  2. record for French exists, but episode name is empty
  3. record for Ukrainian exists, but episode overview is empty
  4. no record at all for German
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@gerafa Thanks for the suggestion, but calling the get all (!) translations method for each (!) episode is not an option. That uses way too many resources both on the device and at TMDB.

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Hi @uwe! Can you detect the language of the response? Maybe it could be an idea to ignore the response, if it has the wrong language (i.e. not the requested one). This could prevent that some series toggle between german and english each day.

Sorry @uwe, I didn’t know my proposal was so heavy on resources. I have another idea that perhaps could be less heavy:

  • get the data as usual (I guess at the moment the app is using this get method, isn’t it?)

  • if the response has a default episode name (like “Épisode 1” for French) and overview is blank, then call again the get method with my secondary language as parameter, or get all translations as explained in my previous comment.

Could this solution work?

This would not help for the case, that TMDB responds with the wrong language (e.g. English instead of German).

Such a fallback would be helpful for cases, when there is no episode name and TMDB sets the default (e.g. “Episode 1” in German) – unfortunately (empty would be much better). But for this Uwe would have to implement all default names for all languages…