woodrbe: I'd be interested in knowing how you handle the (currently all to often occuring) errors from thetvdb.com (such as PHP quota exceeded, server 500 errors, illegal characters in the xml file etc).

I'm stepping through my code and a series that imports fine one minute will fail the next due to one of the errors above. I could obviously handle exceptions and retry the httprequest, but hitting the server continously doesn't seem to be the right thing to do as the error-rate goes up.

Tried setting my request timeout to infinite, which a MSDN article recommended - this didn't seem to help at all (didn't really think it would) as it then errors out on something else completely. Sure this will get better when they sort out their mirroring, but until then it makes for very messy code on my end. I've got my windows service to handle updates working 100% apart from these random errors which I cannot control

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I'm not sure he is handling them per-say.. I have received numerous server errors (server 500 errors) from within the app itself when attempting to fetch episode information. The only way to really "fix" this is to wait and try again in a few minutes.

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Travis Bell
themoviedb.org | The open movie database

woodrbe:

Also, what values do you have in the episode pattern box and extentions box?  A screenshot of the app before you click the export button could help as well.

Ben (woodrbe)

If all of my episodes are named in this format,

lost.s03e04.blabla.blabla.avi

What should I enter in the pattern box?

Thanks man,

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Travis Bell
themoviedb.org | The open movie database

TVCollection Manager 0.9

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Ben (woodrbe)
benwoodring.spaces.live.com

ahelseth:

woodrbe: I'd be interested in knowing how you handle the (currently all to often occuring) errors from thetvdb.com (such as PHP quota exceeded, server 500 errors, illegal characters in the xml file etc).

I'm stepping through my code and a series that imports fine one minute will fail the next due to one of the errors above. I could obviously handle exceptions and retry the httprequest, but hitting the server continously doesn't seem to be the right thing to do as the error-rate goes up.

Tried setting my request timeout to infinite, which a MSDN article recommended - this didn't seem to help at all (didn't really think it would) as it then errors out on something else completely. Sure this will get better when they sort out their mirroring, but until then it makes for very messy code on my end. I've got my windows service to handle updates working 100% apart from these random errors which I cannot control

ahelseth,

I am trapping most errors(some slip thru, trying to fix as they come up) and bypassing the problem.  The user can try  the import again if they don't receive any results.  I do not retry most httprequests except when I don't receive any items on a series match when with replacing spaces with % so I try the request again with a space.

In my testing, the invalid xml file is the most common that I have received.  I have not received the PHP quota exceeded error and I have only seen the server 500 errors once.

I can send you some of my code but it is pretty generic.  I am not doing anything very fancy.

woodrbe

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Ben (woodrbe)
benwoodring.spaces.live.com

Woodrbe,

Just ran into a stumbling block.  I am going through the TV collection on my live database (was using test DB before) and I have Top Gear.  There are a few "Specials" for Top Gear, and I'm not sure how to label them to get them picked up.  If you need an example, there is the last "episode" of Season 9 (technically 09x08) which is actually a special.  It doesn't show up in TVCollection Manager, just wondering if you have any suggestions of how this might work, or what I should be doing.

Keep up the great work!

Schlep

'Nuther one from me...

Am getting my Movie collection all running and have come up against something else.  I flagged a movie as a particular entry and since discovered it's the wrong one.  I can't find any way of being able to mark that movie as "wrong" in the importer so I can select something else.  If I rename the file, it picks it up as something else, but then I have to rename the file

Anyways, just some more feedback, I'll post anything else I come up with along the way.

Absolutely loving that I can finally get my movie and TV database usable, so keep up the great work!

Schlep

woodrbe: Thanks, sounds like you're doing pretty much the same as me then, so I'll just keep trying to optimize the code :) One problem I've run into now is (I'm running several worker threads - from a threadpool) and once I've used two BinaryReaders at once it will stop requesting data from my HttpWebRequest (even though I'm careful about closing them and ServicePointManager.DefaultConnectionLimit = 20) - if you're handling your image grabbing code differently I'd still be interested. I'm grabbing the stream as a Byte[] to put directly into the database.

I'm handling the errors in a WebException now, and it seems to have fixed most if not all the external problems apart from this Byte[] thingy above. catch (WebException e){Debug.WriteLine(e.Message);System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(5000);this.GetShow();}

schleppel: Have a look over at thetvdb.com - they have specials (in most cases anyhow) stored as Season 0 Episode 1++ - so the Polar Special (S09E08 or S10E01) would be S00E03 for example. Having just looked they only have 3 specials for the whole series though, so there are some missing I'm sure.

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Going through the import of my relatively Large Movie collection and had a thought.  I have all of my Movie filenames as <moviename> [<year].avi (eg: Casino Royale [2006].avi).  I think this may actually be making my movies harder to match, as I can remove the year from the file and I get a better match rate.  I don't actually want to remove the year from the file, so I thought it may actually work in my favour if there were some way I could change the expression (or the program had an option) where it would take the year from my file and help match my movie.  I'm not very experienced with expressions, but I would imagine having a "[" as an actual divider might make it more challenging as it has a purpose other than just a character in expressions...

Anyways, just thought I'd throw this out there, as I'd really rather not remove the year from my files, and there are some movies it won't find a match for at all with it there.

Cheers,

Schlep

Not sure if TV Collection Manager takes note of the Regex at all other than just for matching filenames, but you could try something like (.*)(?:\[\d{4}\])\.(.{3}) which will strip out the [year] from the returned match.

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Ok, just had a look and it seems it expects a named capture group (movie) for the title, so using something like (?<movie>.*)(?:\s\[\d{4}\]) should do the trick.

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Next real caveat for for me is automation. Are there plans for some kind of "monitored folder" feature?

It would be nice to just drop files into a directory and have it create the XML automatically. I can't really see this working on new TV series but for existing ones it would be pretty slick, no?

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Travis Bell
themoviedb.org | The open movie database

travisbell: I believe Ben has put thought into creating a service that would auto export data for any TV series that has already been imported if new files appear.  I'm sure this will be when all kinks are worked out of the TVCM app.

bledsoe:

travisbell: I believe Ben has put thought into creating a service that would auto export data for any TV series that has already been imported if new files appear.  I'm sure this will be when all kinks are worked out of the TVCM app.

I am working on the service to update your collection with new episode info(not new series yet) and export your collection at user defined time intervals.  As long as there are no major bugs, I will probably try to get the service in the next release.

Ben (woodrbe)

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Ben (woodrbe)
benwoodring.spaces.live.com

If you ever get it to do automatic (or close to automatic) series matching from the service I think we need to share some code

I've already got the myTV Windows Service up and running to update when new files are dropped into one of your watched folders, I'm having trouble automizing the add show routine though (still have too many matches on certain shows) - currently you still have to add the showfolder from within myTV - the service then receives a message from the database and runs through addepisodes().

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Tah Muchly for that ahelseth, still getting the year as a string in my search (I know this, 'cause when I search for The Never ending Story [1984], the first returned is '1984'.

Ben, If it could be incorporated somehow that it actually uses this field to narrow the search down that would be awesome!

If anyone has any more suggestions to try, I'm all ears.  I'm doing a bit of research, but just don't have a grasp on expressions like some of you appear to

Cheers,

Schlep.