Dealing with remakes

[martyd]

Hi folks,

I've noticed that, with movies, putting the year in the filename allows the automatic metadata retrieval to (usually) get the correct info. However this does not work for TV shows.

Programs like "Father Brown", "Poldark", and "Vanity Fair" were originally done in the seventies, and have been remade in the last few years. No matter what I do with the filenames, the metadata retrieval always comes up with the older series. I've added the year to the folder name, to the file name, with and without brackets, to no avail.

Is there a solution or does it need to be added to the wish list?

[Peter]

Hi Marty,
we have tested this here and added support to the series.xml parsing for reading the year which results in the correct series being found. You can send an email to support [at] conceiva [dot] com and we will send you a beta to try.

[martyd]

Hi Peter,

So I need to create a series.xml for these shows. Do I include the year in the series name or as a separate Year parameter?

[Peter]

The series.xml I used here was:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<Series>
<language>en</language>
<SeriesName>Father Brown</SeriesName>
<Year>2013</Year>
<banner>metadata/01.jpg</banner>
<Overview>Series Description</Overview>
</Series>

[martyd]

Thanks, Peter. That's very helpful.

[martyd]

Sorry, Peter, I can't get it to work.
I uninstalled Mezzmo and installed your beta. I copied your series.xml above into the Father Brown/Season 06 folder, selected an episode and opened the properties dialogue and clicked Get Online Metadata and it still came up with the 1974 version. I tried moving the series.xml to Father Brown folder, but it made no difference.
I'm pretty sure I have the appropriate settings (see attached image).
1144

What else do I need to do?

[Peter]

Try right-clicking on the file and select to Maintain File(s) and then this should read the series.xml and populate the year in the properties then do a metadata lookup.

[martyd]

Yes, thanks. That worked for Father Brown and Poldark, but I can't get the right metadata for Vanity Fair. I copied the series.xml into the folder and edited it with Vanity Fair and 2018, did Maintain Playlist and up came the 1967 version. Tried selecting the files and doing Maintain Files - same result. Restarted Mezzmo GUI and tried again - same result. If I click Get Online Video Metadata the search pane opens with Vanity Fair as a search term - year is not there. If I add 2018 to the search term, it finds the correct one. Curiouser and curiouser.

Edit: Just tried Bodyguard (2018) and it comes up with a 2003 version. There must be something up with my config. Going to try default settings.

Edit: No, that didn't help.

[Peter]

For some reason the year is not populated in the information returned from the metadata server so this is why Vanity Fair is not matching 2018, only for the 2018 series the year is not set - for all others it is.

[martyd]

OK. So the year is missing in the data from thetvdb, is that right? So I can go and fix that on thetvdb and we should be ok?

Edit: At thetvdb First Aired Date is empty for this series. I logged in to my account there to edit the series but there's no place to add that info. Oh, well.

[ftanner]

I typically put (original) and (remake) in my file name. It would be nice if Mezzmo could check for something like that. In the case of multiple remakes, like King Kong, it's usually like (yyyy remake); i.e. (1975 remake).

[Peter]

Mezzmo grabs the year from the filename of movies, for series Mezzmo looks for season and episode but not year so possibly we could add this.

[martyd]

for series Mezzmo looks for season and episode but not year so possibly we could add this.

Ah, yes please. That would be a great help, especially if thetvdb cannot be relied on to provide it.