TMDB for TV Show Information

#1

I came across Sonarr looking for a replacement for SickBeard that uses themoviedb.org API to scrape TV shows. When I came in to this forum I noticed your recent announcement of moving to the TVDB to scrape television.

The TV DB is generally considered inaccurate. Please consider moving to Trevor’s Movie DB by using their new television API.

#2

Moved this out of PM because that wasn’t the correct channel for it.

The movie DB switch in trakt was a big reason why we stopped using trakt.

TMDB is not a good source for variety of reasons:

  • The data was far from updated (plenty of shows were missing already aired episode information, that was already present on TheTVDB).
  • Their show titles do not include the year for new series with the same title, which means we would need to add an alias for every single series with the same title after the original and is bound to cause a multitude of problems
  • Most media centers use TheTVDB for their show/episode information, if the files don’t match that then its going to be a massive headache?

TheTVDB follows a set of rules and generally they’re very rigid about it, unfortunately this conflicts with the people that release episodes from time to time, but without these rules things would change without notice and be more of a headache. TheTVDB follows the network’s direction, if that makes TheTVDB inaccurate its inaccurate at the source.

I think this makes as good a point as any, History Channel and by extension TheTVDB have accurate data, everyone else is inaccurate. My mom always said “If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?” when we wanted to do do something she didn’t approve of and we said “…but, everyone else is doing it”.

Ultimately we chose the data provider that was the most accurate for 99% of shows/users, its not perfect, but we feek its the best choice.

#3

I’d like to chime in that I also find The TV DB to be generally inaccurate. I realize your reasons for using them as the metadata provider, but giving users the ability to choose (especially per show, as Plex does) would be amazing.

#4

came across this from searching. agreed TVDB is awful. perhaps there could be integration with more than one in rank order such as jellyfin uses for meta data. On that note ,it wont help searching, but you can lockout sonarr meta data and completely remove tvdb from meta with-in jellyfin, possible workaround.

#5

TVDB will cause many episodes to be out of sync, and you can even call it an error, because it does not match the data sources of most publishers and even plex, eventually leading to the inability to recognize data that could be classified in TMDB before. This is a terrible problem, even worse than having no data experience

#6

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#7