The Movie Database Support
Support → API Support
Changes to parsing movie names with "the" in them?
posted by DandemonSTAFFMOD on September 3, 2019 at 2:41 AM
Hi guys.
I use both Infuse and Archos Media Player, which access the TMDB for metadata.
Until now I have always named movies that start with "The" by moving the "the" to the end, to keep a decent alphabetical order of movies. For example, "The Last Detail (1973).mp4" is named "Last Detail, The (1973).mp4" in my library.
This has ALWAYS worked in both Archos and Infuse, which parse TMDB correctly and find the right metadata. Until 2 days ago. Now this naming convention fails to find the right movie or even bring it up in a list of guesses.
What's changed at the TMDB end to break this, please? I have hundreds of items named this way and I really, really don't want to go renaming them all.
Thanks in advance...
Reply by Travis Bell
on September 3, 2019 at 10:22 AM
Hi @Dandemon,
I'm not 100% sure... if I search for "Last Detail" on the API, I only get a single result, the 1973 movie, id 14886.
Even if I add the year, it's still only returning a single item:
Reply by Dandemon
on September 3, 2019 at 10:50 AM
Hi Travis. That makes sense to me. But try searching "Last Detail, The". Before now ", The" never used to throw off TMDB pulling up the correct result. Now it does. Why?
Reply by Travis Bell
on September 3, 2019 at 11:38 AM
Search was recently changed so that's definitely why. I've never heard of anyone searching for movies or TV shows with this pattern before (it was certainly never designed to support it, it was just an accident that it happened to support it originally.)
I'll see if it's easy to support but I'm not making any guarantees.
Reply by Dandemon
on September 3, 2019 at 11:41 AM
Thanks Travis - although the 'easy to support' can't be TOO hard, surely, because it WAS working until now!
Reply by Travis Bell
on September 3, 2019 at 11:42 AM
Not quite. The new system is quite different than the old.
Reply by THRobinson
on October 1, 2019 at 8:29 AM
Just wiped out my box last night, went to rescrape and yup, same issue. Not 100% though... a few movies scraped fine where I put "The" after the title, but I have a good 50 movies that didn't and when I click to scrape manually the movie doesn't show in the list of options, I have to retype the movie title with "The" at the beginning. :(
At first I thought maybe it had something to do with alt titles, so added it in to a few, but then saw how many I had which lead me to here.
Reply by THRobinson
on October 3, 2019 at 9:54 PM
@travisbell Hey Travis... I know you're a busy guy but just wanted to see if this was something being changed? or not anytime soon?
I have about 50 that I have to manually type in for the scrape to find, then after that I need to reinstall the one in the family room and scrape that as well, which will have the same issue. If something coming soon, I'll just hold off... if not in the near future, no prob I'll just proceed with the manual scrape.
Reply by FlangeMonkey
on October 28, 2019 at 7:11 PM
This is also an issue for me, are there any changes planned? It never used to be an issue. Interestingly, various films have successful results using this format and various others fail so it appeared like a bug at first.