sbs20

Kodi 19 library failures

2021-06-18 kodi The TVDb

Coding

Kodi 19 Matrix seemingly fails on library scans which worked perfectly in 18. I experienced this recently - my library remained unchanged from before but the scans were only about 85% effective. Of course, from time to time, programs will change for some reason (either they're corrected or the series is remade and requires a more specific identifier e.g. year). But in my case I already had year identifiers and I'd eliminated any obvious issues.

In the end I had to dig into logs to see what was going on. And the weird thing was that the API calls being made seemed correct. I also had a Kodi 18 box lying around and tried the same thing - which worked.

Eventually, it hit me what was going on - I was looking at the detail without noticing the obvious (from the log API calls): Kodi 19 has a new universal scraper for movies and TV which uses only TMDb as its data source.

I had previously thought that TMDb and TheTVDb were two views on the same data - but it seems that's not true. Or at least if it is, the views are materially different. For example TMDb shows Hey Duggee as starting in 2015 whereas TheTVDb shows it starting (correctly) in 2014.

Aside: it may be that TMDb is a better long term solution, which may require either changing my library content slightly and/or updating TMDb with additionalcorrect information. But that's an option for another day.

The solution, after knowing this, was easy - use a different information provider for the TV content. Install The TVDb (new) add on. Then change the content for the TV library to use this provider instead and rescan. Problem solved!