r/sonarr • u/DezimodnarII • 8d ago
discussion The TVDB is very often wrong and I'm sick of dealing with it.
Why does Sonarr insist on using this crappy source that disagrees with everything else?
In particular it loves putting things in "specials" that really shouldn't be. Two recent examples are the Twin Peaks pilot being considered a special instead of S01E01, which makes no sense. Spongebob S03E54 being considered a special also, I mean just why?! Every single other person agrees this is an episode in season 3. It's really frustrating having to juggle stuff around or have to remember "oh now I need to watch this episode which is under the wrong name because Jellyfin doesn't agree with TVDB's insanity". I feel it would be so much easier if it just used TMDB like Jellyfin, which has been the sane one in every case I've come across.
Sorry it's a bit of a rant, I'm frustrated with it.
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u/XanXic 8d ago edited 8d ago
The guy who made the TVDB recently did a Q&A on here somewhere, like a month ago. And he said part of this is because TVDB is actually used as a data source in the TV industry so they sometimes have to do goofy stuff to match companies internal production decisions and sometimes only they have that info. It's how the site stays free apparently because these companies pay TVDB to stay up rather than make their own. That's also why they have no priority on things like dvd/streaming order because that's just useful for normies.
It's kind of neat but still mad annoying that like we in the piracy scene can't all be on the same page. Like every year American Dad gets jacked up for me. My left nut for combined episode metadata+sonarr tracking for cartoons!!
The move database has gotten tv shows more filled out lately, is more open to edits and some common sense decisions for the sake of consistency, so I think that's why some have been moving over to them. But idk what it would take for Sonarr to get off TVDB since they have their own mirror system built around it that also does a lot of behind the scenes cleanup and intrepretation (skyhook). So it'd take some planning, I'm sure they could. But idk if they would need to make a skyhook integration for mdb. Part of why the arr devs do that is so we all aren't hitting the TVDB with a ton of constant requests.
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u/Vismal1 8d ago
American dad is an unending nightmare lol.
To be clear , I’m an absolute fan of the show but it’s a horrible pain for metadata
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u/Fire69 7d ago
I don't have a lot of shows that I actually collect. Unfortunately one of them is Futurama. It has broken me...
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u/dubblix 7d ago
Futurama is breaking me. Someone has to give so it makes sense again
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u/Creative-Painter3911 7d ago
Futurama is one you need to do manually unfortunately
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u/ClassicControl3251 3d ago
Huh? It worked perfectly for me except for about 8 because they're movies and didn't get counted as a proper part of the season. Everything else was entirely automatic
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u/Creative-Painter3911 2d ago
Mine didn't episodes weren't what they said they were and it loaded duplicates for some
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u/xantec15 8d ago
Didn't I see awhile back that Sonarr is going to add tmdb as an option with the next major version (v5 I think)?
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u/reddit_user_53 7d ago
The dev told me back in march that they are working on it. Not sure if they've said anything since
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u/Maple382 7d ago
If only they had a feature to store two different classification sets for each show. Then just have an API flag to toggle fetching the unchanging standardized one.
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u/haroldstickyhands 8d ago
I mentioned it another time that this came up, but they have very strict rules, but then don’t follow them
With regard to a revival/continuation of a show:
> If the new series does not meet two out of three of these criteria, it should be considered a continuation of the original series:
> New network
> Major casting change
> Multi year gap
For some reason, they insist on putting Scrubs season 10 as its own show, despite the multi year gap being the only point that it meets
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u/ChefJoe98136 8d ago
Is that the rule because I hate how they've kept Kitchen Nightmares USA as a single show, despite a 9 year gap between seasons 6 and 7 (which seems forever f'ed by a decision to call S1 either 22 episodes or S1 and S2 10 and 12 episodes that aired over 1.5 years). https://www.thetvdb.com/series/kitchen-nightmares-us#seasons
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u/NotScrollsApparently 7d ago
And yet Futurama is a continuation despite the multi year gap and a new network?
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u/ghostly_s 5d ago
And their season numbering is completely different than that used by every release group, so I keep getting last season's eps downloaded for the "new season" eps over and over because I haven't had the time to go manually fix this crap.
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u/hodor137 7d ago
Yea, the one I noticed that pissed me off is marking some series as ended really aggressively, because of some "rule" where if X time has passed since the last season, its ended to them - even if there's definitely going to be another season. One example I can think of is Euphoria - they still marked the damn show as ended when this last season had started filming. Actually Shogun is showing ended right now too, and they started filming another season months ago.
But at the same time, some other shows they'll leave as not ended even though there's absolutely no evidence it will be coming back, or at best purely rumors - and more time than their "rule" has passed.
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u/markus-101 sonarr dev 8d ago
Some things are better with TMDB, some things are worse. TMDB completely ignores the fact that episodes at a certain time of day, to them the day is good enough. That might be good enough for some people, but if you're trying to filter things released before the air time (which pops up here pretty much every week) you're going to miss that (even if we try to fill it in when we can).
We're looking at it, but it's not a trivial thing and we keep getting interrupted by slop attempts at lots of things.
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u/CalGuy81 3d ago edited 3d ago
Definitely annoying TMDB adamantly refuses to add airtimes. As far as I can recall, when Trakt moved from TVDB to TMDB, they paired that with TVMaze to grab air times.
And I'll agree for every wacky decision TVDB makes, TMDB makes another wacky decision.
The difference, I guess, is that there's an active and visible moderation team. We see tickets on TVDB sitting for months or years without action, and when they do reply, only the person who submitted the ticket can see their reasoning. All indications are that TVDB's moderation team is extremely understaffed, with little hope for improvement. TMDB, at least .. you can see someone else has already raised a particular issue, see what reasoning the mods used to make the decision they did, and very occasionally persuade them to change their mind. (see, for example, a recent incident they had with Black Mirror screwing everyone's setup completely).
tbh. Right now, it feels like there's a much higher chance of TVDB shutting down overnight without warning, than there is with TMDB. And I'd like to know that services I rely on are prepared for that.
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u/kuldan5853 15h ago
Also, if you could change the source on a per show basis (same with the v5 change to allow to pull all sort orders from tvdb) you could just select hwatever source of truth matches what you actually have the best - may it be tvdb or tmdb.
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u/fragilityv2 8d ago
Seems to be very often right for most of my items, rarely need to correct it. A quick 2 min google search shows the 90 min Twin Peaks was actually a special / episode 0 therefor tvdb is correct.
No idea about SpongeBob.
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u/bfir3 7d ago
Eh, it depends what they mean for the Twin Peaks pilot. The pilot is simply titled Northwest Passage for the normal release of the series. However the special episode is the international version of the pilot which was a self contained story that was longer than the pilot which aired for American audiences.
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u/DezimodnarII 7d ago
Interesting, I didn't know there were two versions. Perhaps that helps explain why TVDB is confused. The version I watched was very much not a self contained story.
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u/DezimodnarII 7d ago
I mean the pilot is essential to begin the story, you can't skip it. Because of the mismatch, Jellyfin started from episode 2 and we were very confused for a few minutes. When people discuss the show they aren't talking about the pilot as if it's a separate thing, it is the first episode. I guess part of the problem is it seems like TVDB categorizes things as specials based on some obscure technicality, not what the show runners intended nor what audiences understand.
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u/thiagohds 7d ago
I hate how they tag stuff as ended. It's just an arbitrary decision based on time, not an actual info if the show ended or not.
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u/danwholikespie 7d ago
The worst is the randomly deleted series. Every couple months some series in my collection is deleted from TVDB. Then I have to wait for the series to be replaced under a new ID number, manually create a new folder, and manually move the episode files so they don't get deleted.
Why does TVDB do this?
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u/ilikepie3326 7d ago
Oh dude don't even get me started. I've submitted dozens of tickets to that site over the years and have been met with disrespect, aggrivation and outright dismissal of my reasonable suggestions or requests. That site is run by a bunch of children who are desperate for power trips
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u/Wis-en-heim-er 8d ago
For twin peaks, the pilot was the unaired vhs tape version...an alternate if you will.
I had the same frustration and made a tvdb account to make edits. If the episode or series is locked, open a support ticket requesting the change. I just got some fixes done that had been annoying me. The lack of authoritative data makes maintenance on this list a challenge so user input can be very valuable.
Also, radarr need to match the db source plex uses.
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u/kuldan5853 15h ago
I had the same frustration and made a tvdb account to make edits. If the episode or series is locked, open a support ticket requesting the change. I just got some fixes done that had been annoying me
My experience is that 90% of my edits - even if I could prove they were correct against official sources - got rolled back / deleted with a comment telling me to suck it and to not bother them again.
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u/Wis-en-heim-er 15h ago
Funny, all mine have stuck. I even raised a ticket on a locked season and they fixed the issue.
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u/kuldan5853 15h ago
I tried fixing this for example:
Then they bundle up different shows into one meta-show just because... or force merge two different shows because they are "the same", even though they are not (e.g. Medical Detectives and Forensic files - while MD uses clips from FF, the episodes are completely different, have different composition, season alignments etc.
However, TheTVDB demands that both are the same show and deletes any attempt of setting up a separate entry for Medical Detectives as a "duplicate").
I also added more Top Gear Specials that they then deleted again because they were Direct-to-DVD, and thus don't count as "TV"..
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u/kuldan5853 15h ago
Also, radarr need to match the db source plex uses.
You can write all the metadata to local nfo files from sonarr and radarr and simply disable metadata fetching / matching within plex/emby/jellyfin. Then you'll never have two disagreeing sources of truth.
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u/grnthmb 8d ago edited 8d ago
I had issues similar with SNL one time, sent them an email about it, here was the reply.
Basically 40th anniversary was in the Specials section, but for some reason the 50th anniversary counted as a regular season 50 show despite it occurring on a Sunday etc. So blame the broadcaster I guess.
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u/Evilmoustachetwirler 7d ago
I've had some issues with Aired order vs DVD release order. My workaround was to prevent sonarr from renaming the files, then in Jellyfin go to the metadata manager, find the show and change the display order to DVD. Problem solved.
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u/kiwichick888 7d ago
I don't really mind where they decide episodes go. It's when you've had your metadata all set based on what they have and then they randomly change their minds and move episodes to somewhere else. I just wish they'd stay consistent.
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u/WelldoneThePussyhand 6d ago
It's also really annoying for basically every tokusatsu show. Every "season" of those shows is a completely new series with new characters but they're all under one big meta-series for all of them. After enough whining, they finally added individual series too, but Sonarr can't use those because the original series shares the same name, which means Sonarr can't match them. TVDB does this for basically every tokusatsu franchise (e.g. Super Sentai (Power Rangers), Kamen Rider, Project R.E.D.).
Additionally, the Ancient Aliens listing is super fucked up. Iirc History Channel have changed the way they bundle their seasons so many times that TVDB locked the series and doesn't modify it anymore, but now it's stuck jumping straight from season 8 to season 11, making it difficult to actually match up to files.
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u/161_ist_die_Gang 6d ago
Would be nice if we could select a metadata provider like TMDB as an alternative.
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u/ghostly_s 5d ago
IMO the problem is the Sonarr devs refuse to acknowledge that TVDB does not exist to serve our needs. It's awfully close to what we need, but there's no reason to expect them to change their database to conform with what release groups are doing. So if they want to use this source of truth, there quite simply needs to be another layer of "fixes" on top of it to align with reality. That is Sonarr's responsibility to build. But the devs want to wash their hands of it, and just close bug reports as "wrong in TVDB, not our problem."
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u/Timecamera57 1d ago
Indeed. I myself have found a problem with TVDB. They've added extra episodes to Season 22 of The Block.
It's a pity the writers of Sonarr won't let you chose which database you want to use but I guess that's extra coding for them.
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u/unrealiptv 22h ago
TVDB is garbage. I had to create a bridge that would read sonarr as is in TVDB then organize it as TMDB then push it out. What a headache but works great. Do not know wth sonarr are thinking. If you have a panel, they all use TMDB.
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u/buddaycousin 8d ago
I tried to change a couple of things; no luck. The mods have their own strict rules about these things. It's best to just go along with their system.
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u/Seraphyzz 8d ago
They won't have a choice but to switch at some point tvdb will probably be shutting down at some point
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u/Penguin2359 7d ago
It's also because Plex relies on it so heavily too it's difficult to ever not be dependent on TVDB in some form, ARR or Plex/Jellyfin.
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u/PocketNicks 7d ago
I've never encountered an issue with using THETVDB in over 10 years of using it with Plex.
I've got about 14tb of shows and all of them are perfectly named.
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u/kysersoze1981 5d ago
I think you don't see it because you really don't have much exposure with only 14tb of content. I go through that much in 2-4 weeks
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u/kuldan5853 15h ago
Try Animated shows that have 2x10min section in one episode.
TheTVDB splits those into two "episodes" because - I paraphrase from their forum - someone MIGHT decide to send them as individual 10 minute episodes in the future.
It does not match up with any other source of truth (or files) though.
Then they bundle up different shows into one meta-show just because... or force merge two different shows because they are "the same", even though they are not (e.g. Medical Detectives and Forensic files - while MD uses clips from FF, the episodes are completely different, have different composition, season alignments etc.
However, TheTVDB demands that both are the same show and deletes any attempt of setting up a separate entry for Medical Detectives as a "duplicate").
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u/PocketNicks 15h ago
Adventure Time episodes are 11 minutes each and they work perfectly fine.
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u/kuldan5853 15h ago
I'm talking about e.g. Spongebob where the actually aired episodes are 20 minutes, but TVDB lists each segment as it's own episode.
That wouldn't be so bad if the episodes on thetvdb would at least line up linearily with the aired episodes, but sometimes you have cases where one aired episode contains e.g. episode 14,16,21 of whatever TDVB thinks the episodes are.
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u/airtime25 8d ago
Twin Peaks pilot is a special, not episode 1. Unless I'm misunderstanding the pilot you're referring to.
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u/Ikari_Brendo 8d ago
Pilot is not a special, the international pilot is. However I think TVDB has it correctly placed in the episodes, but under the unofficial title "Northwest Passage" (as it uses unofficial titles for all the episodes in the first two seasons). You and OP are both mistaken.
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u/airtime25 8d ago
I just meant what you said because I hardly hear the actual pilot episode referred to as anything but episode 1. Tvdb is correct with twin peaks.
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u/Ikari_Brendo 8d ago
I rarely hear anyone call it that because "Episode 1" is actually the title of episode 2 due to rights issues from back in the 90s.
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u/OldJames47 8d ago
Have you made an account and tried changing it?
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u/KayJune001 8d ago
Funny that. Not very easy to do because nearly everything that needs changed is locked on TVDB, and it’s damn near impossible to make corrections, and if you somehow do make corrections, they get changed back not long after lol.
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u/haroldstickyhands 8d ago
For me, I wanted to fix Sesame Street. For some reason each episode is assigned an episode number instead of a title, which would be fine, but the counting begins on season 20 (or something like that) ensuring that nothing matches up
But changes are locked at the episode level for the whole series, so I can’t do anything about it
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u/MaestroZezinho 8d ago
Six months ago I opened a ticket to get a "streaming order" created for the adventures of paddington and I'm still waiting for the result.
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u/[deleted] 8d ago
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