Manually Adding a TV Series (1 Viewer)

[ReverendJ1]

I am having issues manually adding a 'TV Series'. It isn't an actual TV series but a bunch of animated shorts made by Disney, so I wouldn't want to add them to thetvdb. I have all the shorts listed as specials with no episode number. When I try to edit the info on any of them (to add descriptions, etc.), it changes the info of all of them to match what I changed. Is there any way around this, as there is no real way to number them?

 

[ReverendJ1]

Well, I think I found out how to do this sort of. It isn't pretty/easy, but I got something working. If anyone else has any interest in doing this for any videos that aren't technically TV Shows, but aren't exactly movies, let me know and I'll post what I did. Other reasons to do this would be shows like Ren & Stimpy or Beavis & Butthead, where the show is actually 3 mini shows put together, it would be nicer to list each part separately.

 

[whatisk]

I'd be interested in the process.
I have a heap of documentaries from various channels I'd love to have show in TV Series rather than My Videos.

 

[psiebe]

Same here, has been my request from day one to prevent having to enter too much trash myself on mytvdb

Any chances to lock data locally as well? as mytvdb data gets modified quite often to data I think is worse?

 

[ReverendJ1]

I'll make up some formal instructions once I'm done with my Disney shorts, because it was some trial and error I am not exactly sure what I did. I plan on adding another 'series' soon (GI Joe PSA's) and will detail my process. I am also not sure if adding another series will mess this up yet, as I haven't had any time to test it. In the meantime, here is what I did in a nutshell:
I added the season automatically, with all episodes listed as season 0, episode 0. This created the season entry and made a basis to go off for all the episodes.
I then downloaded SQLAdministrator, which I found to be a little better for the task than the program that comes with Mediaportal.
IMPORTANT! - Backup your TVSeriesDatabase.db3 file! I borked it several times playing around with it.
Open the TVSeriesDatabase4.db3 file in SQLAdministrator.
Go to local_episodes table.
Change the episode numbers to be actual numbers 1-x
Change the compositeID so it is correct. It should be 'SeriesID'_0x'EpsiodeNumber'
Go to online_episodes table
For each episode you will need to add the CompositeID, SeriesID, SeasonIndex and EpisodeIndex from the local_episodes table.
I gave each episode an EpisodeID of 1, so it wouldn't match anything on thetvdb, and set OnlineUpdated to 1 for the same reason.
Make sure to change Hidden to 0 so your episodes will show up in the list.
Fill in the episode title and summary yourself with appropriate data.

I think you can put your own banners in through the setup program, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

Open up MediaPortal and test.

To clarify, I am not sure if this is exactly what I did to get it started, so don't blame me if it doesn't work. I'll write up some better instructions when I start my next series.

When you add files to the series you will have to update the EpisodeID and CompositeID for all the episodes in both tables. This way you can keep them alphabetical, instead of having any episode added to the end. SQLAdministrator allows you to sort columns in the database alphabetically, which is why I chose it (I think).