Problems with Fanart with two movies with the same name

[wayner]

I am having trouble getting different Fanart to show for movies where you have multiple movies with the exact same name. The filenames are different as in "Alice in Wonderland (1951).mkv" and "Alice in Wonderland (2010).mkv" But I can't seem to change the Fanart with the library manager or whatever as it stays with the Fanart from the original Alice movie.

Has anyone else noticed this or is this issue unique to my setup?

[Skirge01]

It's not just you. I suspect this could be related to how BMT doesn't handle years for TV shows properly (e.g. The Flash from 1990 versus The Flash from 2014). I have the same issue you're talking about with movies The Great Gatsby and Grendel.

[stuckless]

When the original "Central Fanart" model was created (not by me) it did not include the YEAR in the title, and so, the physical location for 2 movies (or tv shows) with the same title but different years, will be the same location on the file system.

[wayner]

Ok, thanks. Could you get around this by placing a jpg file with the same filename (sans extension) in the same folder as the movie file? Or does it not use that if you have a central fanart folder.

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by stuckless

When the original "Central Fanart" model was created (not by me) it did not include the YEAR in the title, and so, the physical location for 2 movies (or tv shows) with the same title but different years, will be the same location on the file system.

Just so I'm not spreading misinformation, does that mean it's unrelated to the BMT issue?

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

Just so I'm not spreading misinformation, does that mean it's unrelated to the BMT issue?

More accurately, it's a "Phoenix" issue now... since that's were all the fanart management happens... but to my point, when Phoenix implement "central fanart" it did so using the rules that were existing. Phoenix actually supports a pluggable fanart lookup system, and it does implement a couple (local and central), but it is possible to either create a 3rd model and use it, or, simply update the central fanart rules to account for YEAR in all cases.

To be honest there are number of different issues with the current implementations... this being one...the other being the lack of support for specials.... and I'm sure people could come up with 100 other issues At some point it wil have to looked at again, and maybe once SageTV goes open source, I (or someone) will look at creating a leaner implementation that addresses these issues.

[wayner]

But doesn't this also depend on external bodies as well, like TVDB and TMDB which are often the source of the metadata and Fanart. If I remember correctly, TVDB doesn't handle specials very well either.

Another issue is sports - I would like to see Fanart for sports as that is a lot of my recording and viewing. But TVDB refuses to allow sports in their database for some reason. As a basic they could provide you with some generic Fanart when the Title is "NHL Hockey" and ideally provide team specific Fanart when Teams = "Toronto" and "Montreal".

[Fuzzy]

It was QUITE a while ago when we, as a community, hashed out the 'best' method at the time to store fanart, and, as stuckless points out, we missed the multiple movies with same name issue. consider this a legacy issue. tmdb, imdb, etc have all done much better, and do clear the issue up with year. It's just a matter of bringing phoenix up to the current 'state of the art', or quite possibly, simply creating a new fanart system. Phoenix has a lot of features that are not necessarily needed now that the source systems (tmdb, thetvdb, etc) are much more mature. A new system could be developed that would end up being a fraction of the size and complexity as phoenix, and likely serve 99% of people's purposes at this point. this is of course no slight on stuckless' work on phoenix, because the sources he was dealing with back then were pretty 'iffy' for consistency. Since they all offer API's now, and they have instituted strict database rule son their end, it is so much easier to implement something from scratch now, that that is likely the 'best' way to go.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

It was QUITE a while ago when we, as a community, hashed out the 'best' method at the time to store fanart, and, as stuckless points out, we missed the multiple movies with same name issue. consider this a legacy issue. tmdb, imdb, etc have all done much better, and do clear the issue up with year. It's just a matter of bringing phoenix up to the current 'state of the art', or quite possibly, simply creating a new fanart system. Phoenix has a lot of features that are not necessarily needed now that the source systems (tmdb, thetvdb, etc) are much more mature. A new system could be developed that would end up being a fraction of the size and complexity as phoenix, and likely serve 99% of people's purposes at this point. this is of course no slight on stuckless' work on phoenix, because the sources he was dealing with back then were pretty 'iffy' for consistency. Since they all offer API's now, and they have instituted strict database rule son their end, it is so much easier to implement something from scratch now, that that is likely the 'best' way to go.

I certainly won't be offended if somone wants to re-invent what Phoenix does... It probably won't be me, since I already know the task ahead. Doing a lookup (ie using the API for tmdb, tvdb, etc) is by far the easiest part of the entire metadata/fanart lookup process. The harder part was dealing with the myriad of ways users wanted to add media to their collections... ie, some used folders (video ts folders, blu ray folders), some used filenames, and then in the filenames, especially for TV, you get s#e# or #.# or in the case of sage recordings, just an airing # (in addition to other formats). Much of the complexity of phoenix is supporting all of those use cases (in addition to a few more like finding metadata by date, and by episode name... sounds easy, but ends up being lots of code). And then there is the fuzzy matching when names contain & instead of the word 'and' and vice versa, etc. The complexity of metadata lookups is not really about the interaction with the lookup provider, but just deciphering what you should be looking up

By far the easiest way to reduce the code is to simply mandate a strict filename for TV and Movies. ie, all TV MUST be Title.S#E#.ext and then you have 1 way to find TV... You still have to deal with (YEAR) in the title, but that's easier to manage, and you still may have to do 2 lookups per title... one with YEAR and one without, but again, that's still easier to manage than the use cases that Phoenix has to deal with