some files regularly import incorrectly, "delete from disk" is the only option available (2 Viewers)

Statick

Portal Pro
December 25, 2008
124
9
Home Country
United Kingdom United Kingdom
I'm currently doing a big DVD rip of about 100 episodes from discs, and importing them into MP after every couple of discs has completed encoding (usually about 3 eps per disc, so imports of 3-9 eps at a time usually), and I'm having a problem with importing them which seems to coincide with the latest update of MyTVseries which I installed about a week earlier.

The problem I'm having is two-fold :

When the importer lists all the files found, only some of my new files appear. Say if I drop 6 new episodes into the folder, then maybe only 4 of them appear in the list to import. All the files are named with the same convention "TVshow 1x01 - Episode.mkv", there's no obvious reason for some of them to not appear, and I've never encountered this problem before (with about 2TB of successfully imported TV shows). There doesn't appear to be a pattern to it, it's not a certain fixed number of files - it's simply that "some files" don't appear in the importer. Indeed, when I later attempt another import of the same files (more on that later), the ones that didn't appear the first time DO appear the second time, so it doesn't appear to be a problem with the file naming or content, or there'd be some consistency as to which files fail to appear in the importer.

I then go through the match process, and make sure the episodes that were listed are correctly matched, then complete the import. This series in particular has a very different order on my UK discs than the order listed at thetvdb.com so I have to manually match almost every episode in the database.

When I then look in "details", and examine this show in the database, in fact all the files I originally tried to import are there - the 4 that the importer listed, as well as the 2 that it didn't. However these extra ones have been auto-matched, and as I'm having to manually match the episodes, they've been matched incorrectly.

I don't know why this is happening - I know MyTVseries can be set to watch for changes in the watch folders every few minutes, but MP isn't running when I do the import, and if I check "details" before running the import, those extra episodes aren't listed. Then after the import, there they are. So I'm certain they're being imported as a part of the import I've run, but they're not coming up in the file list or the match list, and they're being auto-matched in the database. I've repeated this having noticed it a little while ago, as I say I'm importing new episodes after encoding every couple of discs, and I've just completed my 5th import of additional episodes. And for the 5th time, some files were missing in the importer file list, but they still got imported and auto-matched incorrectly. That's 5 times out of 5, so it's very repeatable.

The next problem I have is this - when I then go to delete the incorrectly matched episodes from the list, so I can re-import them and match them correctly, all the options apart from "delete from disk" are greyed out. So I can't just remove them from the database and re-import. This is only happening on the incorrectly matched episodes that got auto-matched - all other episodes allow me to "delete from database" and I think the problem is because they've been matched to episodes that already have an existing match, so that episode now appears twice in the database, with a different file for each (the correct file, and the new incorrect file).

"Delete from disk" isn't something I want to do, because it's not a duplicate file, in fact it's the product of an 8 hour encode, and the first couple of times this happened and I clicked "delete" and then "OK" without properly looking, I lost data, and couldn't figure out why. Now I'm aware of what's happening, I'm keeping a duplicate of the files before I import them, so I can delete any incorrect matches from the database (and disk), then re-import from the duplicates. But this is hardly ideal! Re-importing these lost files then suffers the same problem - I just had to re-import 3 episodes that didn't get correctly imported last time, and two of those appeared in the importer, the third that did not was still imported but incorrectly matched for the second time!

I've been running MP and MyTVseries for years and never encountered this problem until now. I have almost 2TB of successfully imported TV series, I'm certain if there were a problem with my file naming / encoding / importing workflow, I'd have noticed that by now. My general assumption ties this to the latest update I installed a week or so ago as a part of the StreamedMP skin update, but of course it doesn't necessarily have to be that.

Edit: in fact, could this be due to the fact that I'm having to manually match every episode as the order is so different from the database? Maybe the importer is deliberately ignoring any files which have a numerical match in the database, but then importing them anyway?
 

RoChess

Extension Developer
  • Premium Supporter
  • March 10, 2006
    4,434
    1,897
    Instead of importing 1x01 as 1x07 (example) and having to do this for all the other episodes that are out of order at time of import, why don't you just rename the filed ahead of time to be 1x07 and then have everything mass-import correctly without any manual interaction required.

    And without logs capturing the full problem, it is impossible to tell you why it is not working for you. So you will have to do a full delete from database on the show from inside MP-TVSeries config, and then re-import fresh again via import wizard.
     

    Statick

    Portal Pro
    December 25, 2008
    124
    9
    Home Country
    United Kingdom United Kingdom
    i was importing them bit by bit as they were encoding, so i could start watching the series. in the end i just gave up, waited for the whole lot to encode, then re-numbered the episodes to match the order offered.
     

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