Hey Lysator,

I agree that it seems at a glance, the second approach is the proper way to do it.

It seems funny that if none of the other sources have some of these episodes marked as specials like TVDb does and again, only speaking from a birds eye view—that's your red herring. Probably not worth paying attention to and following what everyone else has.

Having said that, sometimes the hardcore-est of fans know more than we do, and perhaps there is a reason they're marked as such. But in general, there's no rule saying TVDb is any more right than anyone else so I would just go with the flow and what looks to be the bigger standard.

Hi Lysator, does it make sense to get rid of the made up fake season when departing from TheTVDB episode numbering? As far as I know neither Tatort nor Polizeiruf 110 don't do seasons in the US TV sense. e.g. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Tatort-Folgen gives an overview of the "producing station / team / case #" combinations.

OK - I know about all these discussions and it would make sense to spend some thoughts about how to organise the information. Let's start with some information for our friends outside Germany:

"Polizeiruf 100" and "Tatort" are two very long running (both started around 1970 and still running) german crime TV series with lots of episodes (Polizeiruf has about 350, Tatort about 950 episodes). There is definitively an absolute numbering scheme but there is also another sorting criteria: the detective teams.

Basically we can say for sure that there are no seasons, as usual in other TV series. Nevertheless there are some good reasons for organising the information in "virtual" seasons (based on the broadcast year):

1. It brings some structure in an endless list of episodes
2. IMDB does the same
3. Loading, displaying and navigating in a list of many hundreds (or thousands) of episodes is not really funny in a media center

Said that, let's talk about another sorting criteria: the detective teams. After about 40 years, several detective teams were starring in these series. Many fans (like me) would like to consider them as a secondary sort method.

In the past we saw that in TheTVDB the community started to create additional TV series like "Tatort - Thiel & Boerne" or "Tatort - Schimanski" in order to introduce a secondary archiving and sorting method. From my point of view, this was a useful workaround. From a practical point of view, I decided to store on my NAS the video files based on the linear list:

In the directory "Tatort" my files are stored this way:

Tatort - S1991E13 - EP0250 - Schimanski-Thanner - 28 - Kinderlieb.avi
Tatort - S1991E14 - EP0251 - Batic - 03 - Die chinesische Methode.avi
Tatort - S1991E15 - EP0250 - Schimanski-Thanner - 29 - Der Fall Schimanski.avi
Tatort - S1992E10 - EP0262 - Batic - 04 - Kainsmale.avi
Tatort - S1993E01 - EP0268 - Stoever - 19 - Amoklauf.mp4
Tatort - S1993E11 - EP0278 - Batic - 05 - Ein Sommernachtstraum.avi

But since I love also to organise them based on the detective teams, I have directories like "Tatort Schimanski" containing symbolic links to the original files:

Tatort - Schimanski-Thanner - S01E27-0244 - Bis zum Hals im Dreck.avi -> ../Tatort/Tatort - S1991E07 - EP0244 - Schimanski-Thanner - 27 - Bis zum Hals im Dreck.avi
Tatort - Schimanski-Thanner - S01E28-0250 - Kinderlieb.avi -> ../Tatort/Tatort - S1991E13 - EP0250 - Schimanski-Thanner - 28 - Kinderlieb.avi
Tatort - Schimanski-Thanner - S01E29-0252 - Der Fall Schimanski.avi -> ../Tatort/Tatort - S1991E15 - EP0250 - Schimanski-Thanner - 29 - Der Fall Schimanski.avi

Nevertheless there are some serious disadvantages in storing the series information in this way, and exactly because of this, there are some very furious discussions in the TheTVDB forum. Although I hate the language and attitude of those discussions, since they are not very polite and we see a lot of edit wars including some admins that lock or delete information without permitting any discussion and without any idea what may be the user requirements, there is one important aspect that I agree with at 100%:

Making so breaks one of the fundamental golden rules of documentation: no duplicate information

Because of that, I think we should not start doing the same thing here. But there is one much more important thing that we can do: understanding that there is a user requirement to provide some alternative sorting/organisation methods for some TV series that do not comply with the standard scheme.

We should discuss about that and try to find a valid technical solution for it. A solution that would not imply duplicating information.

Hi Lysator, I started to collect random bits of information and examples to base a schema design on at http://wiki.xmltv.org/index.php/User:Dekarl#Proper_TV_Metadata_Schema_Bits_and_Pieces_.28Hi_TVBrainz.29

With regard to Tatort/Polizeiruf, I think that one movie/episode database entry should be able to be referenced by multiple "ordered lists of episodes". They could be children of a parent series. Basically replacing the "group by year fake seasons" with a different grouping criteria.

So a series itself can be seen as an unordered container of episodes. Give it some automatic filters (e.g. by year, by profession of guest, by detective teams, by topic). Similar to faceted search on shop sites. The traditional seasons would then be just one kind of ordered set based on "tv station renewed the series for season 5". Ordered sets of episodes would also come in handy once the DVD/Bluray section opens to track discs that contain a bunch of random episodes of a series. (e.g. grouped by holiday season)