I’ve had the same setup for years, with the only thing changing lately being the switch from SB to Drone. I’ve noticed 3 times now the same issue. When I add a brand new show to Drone (latest example, Years of Living Dangerously), everything appears fine (the directory is created, metadata loaded etc), but when the episodes download, XBMC can’t see them. To get XBMC to see them, I have to navigate to the show in XBMC, go to INFO and force a refresh. This’ll ask if I want to pull data from the internet, and if I select yes it refreshes and all is fine (it see’s the episodes) but if I tell it to use the local info then the problem persists.
I assume because of this it’s some sort of problem with the metadata. Obviously not ideal, and is a fairly major issue, but it’ll be interesting to see if it’s just me (no idea why that would be the case).
Anyway, happy to run any tests you might need to diagnose the problem.
There are a number of people relying on it and have been for some time, a bit surprised that this would have gone on this long. It would be helpful to see the metadata output from SB and drone side by side (for the same episode) to see how they differ. Perhaps have drone re-create it for an existing episode that SB created it for?
Ok, at first glance, the major difference appears to be that SB includes the Year (< year>2014< /year>) tag whereas Drone does not. I could see that being something that could cause this I suppose. It’s feasible that it’s not explicit enough for XBMC to find the correct show.
Here’s the tvshow.nfo for both: http://pastebin.com/n4aVyU2V
The only other differences are in the included images which I don’t suppose would affect anything:
SB:
fanart.jpg
folder.jpg
tvshow.fno
Drone:
banner.jpg
fanart.jpg
poster.jpg
season01-poster.jpg
tvshow.nfo
Do you have episode metadata being created by drone? SB has the episode guide URL set, which allows XBMC to update the episode metadata, drone doesn’t set that currently.
I’ve totally disabled SB, so yep Drone handles all the metadata now.
Well, I ran an experiment with Fargo as it was just released today. Drone created it without the year tag, so I forced a download and sure enough XBMC doesn’t see it (it’s sitting in the “watched” section, but there’s no metadata and it can’t see the episode).
So I moved the series folder elsewhere, deleted the show from XBMC, rebooted, and ran a new scan to make sure it was gone. Then I added the year tag to the nfo, moved the folder back, and did another scan. Still nothing…
Next I repeated the first part (moved and deleted) and this time added the episodeguide url tags. Moved it back, did a scan, and still nothing. Weird.
I can see, during the XBMC scan, that it see’s the Fargo folder (as it pops up in the notification bubble), but it just doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. You’d think it’d definitely something metadata related just due to that.
I think what I’ll try now is add Fargo to sickbeard, but in a separate folder, then I’ll replace the drone nfo with the SB nfo and give it another scan to see if it shows up.
Yep, interesting. I had SB generate a tvshow.nfo and I replaced the drone version with it. This works fine…
Pretty strange. Here are the contents of both .nfo’s for Fargo: http://pastebin.com/jPBB48E4 (ignore that the rating tag isn’t closed properly, I just stuffed that up when putting it in pastebin)
Now, given that I did try adding the year and episodeguide to the Drone version, and this still didn’t work, what else could it be? The encoding? Permissions of the file?
When you replaced the SB tvshow.nfo with the drone version, had XBMC already scanned it in?
Does XBMC see the series at all with XBMC created metadata?
Drone is also creating the episode metadata? You said drone is handling all metadata now, but tvshow.nfo is for the series, so I’m unsure if these are being created.
I just had drone create XBMC metadata for Castle (2009) with one file imported (and metadata created), disabled my wifi so XBMC could only use the already created metadata, added a TV folder to XBMC and scanned, it picked up just fine, the series and the episode is now in XBMC with the relevant metadata being used (I can see the title, description and other information).
My XBMC Metadata settings in drone: https://db.tt/xNhBCNP4
@markus101 said:
When you replaced the SB tvshow.nfo with the drone version, had XBMC already scanned it in?
Does XBMC see the series at all with XBMC created metadata?
Drone is also creating the episode metadata? You said drone is handling all metadata now, but tvshow.nfo is for the series, so I’m unsure if these are being created.
I just had drone create XBMC metadata for Castle (2009) with one file imported (and metadata created), disabled my wifi so XBMC could only use the already created metadata, added a TV folder to XBMC and scanned, it picked up just fine, the series and the episode is now in XBMC with the relevant metadata being used (I can see the title, description and other information).
My XBMC Metadata settings in drone: https://db.tt/xNhBCNP4
Hi 
It’s not really related to the episode metadata, as it’s the whole series it’s having trouble identifying. I have episode metadata disabled (XBMC has always handled that itself, so I find it’s just unnecessary files laying around in the folders. I never had SB generate it either).
Basically, this is the rundown of events:
*. Show does not exist at all in XBMC
- Add new show (Fargo for example) to Drone. Drone creates the folder, the tvshow.nfo and the image files.
*. Episoide is downloaded and put in the above folder. XBMC does it’s scan, but doesn’t recognise the show at all (it picks up that the folder and images exist, but it can’t parse the tvshow.nfo properly to complete all the details. Any episodes are not picked up due to this).
*. I move the Fargo folder somewhere else so that XBMC can’t see it, and completely delete the show from XBMC so there’s no trace of it.
- I generate a tvshow.nfo through sickbeard, and put that in the Fargo folder, overwriting the Drone version.
*. I move the folder back to where XBMC can see it, and kick off a scan.
- Everything is fine, XBMC parses the tvshow.nfo correctly.
It’s just something wrong with how Drone is creating the tvshow.nfo, but I’ve no idea what or how. Would it be useful if I send each version to you so you can have a look at them? The contents differ (as discussed above), but I’m not sure it’s related to that as I tried adding the missing details and it still didn’t work. The only thing I can think of is that it’s encoded weirdly (UTF vs who knows what) or some sort of weird permissions thing so XBMC just can’t see it, or access it.
I do agree that it’s odd 
Perhaps it’s OSX related?
EDIT: I’ll enable episode metadata anyway, just in case, and re-run all those tests. Can’t hurt.
It’s because you don’t (didn’t) have episode metadata being created and drone doesn’t set to episode guide url which means XBMC expects the episode metadata to the created and will not be able to find it online.
I’ll take a look at setting the episode guide url, but the proper solution to prevent XBMC from getting or having to get the episode metadata is to have drone create it.
Alrighty, I’ll give that a good test tomorrow and will let you know 
Happy with that if it fixes the issue though.
Problem is, I added the episodeguide stuff to the drone nfo yesterday, and it made no difference.
If XBMC had already scanned the series in, it would have no effect.
@markus101 said:
If XBMC had already scanned the series in, it would have no effect.
Yeah, I made sure it was completely purged from XBMC before I added it again (see above), so technically it should have worked if that were the issue.
Anyway, I’ll get back to you once I’ve been able to test if the episode metadata fixes it.
All good
Ran the same tests (completely deleted Fargo and purged it from XBMC) readded it to Drone from scratch (including episode metadata) and it scanned in fine
Thanks for the help