Updated: TheTVDB.com Downtime

November 16th, 2009 theuni

tv-iconAs many of our forum users have pointed out, thetvdb.com is currently down. This notice is a bit late, it seems that they’ve been having trouble all weekend.

Obviously, as thetvdb is the default TV scraper for XBMC, many of you will not be able to scrape your shows. Not to worry though, they know about the problem and are moving their server to a new datacenter. You can watch for a status update over at their forum. Until they’re back up, please be patient and don’t file tickets about the issue.

Site and scraper are back up. Thanks to everyone over at TheTVDB.com for the hard work and quick response.

  1. SplasPood
    November 16th, 2009 at 10:10 | #1

    I eventually found their forums after it stopped working and that explained why. However, I seem to be unable to select any of the alternate scrapers in XBMC. While it lets me select TVRage, for example, all requests still seem to be directed at thetvdb.com. Is *this* a known bug?

  2. November 16th, 2009 at 14:04 | #2

    Thanks. :) Nice having it one spot on here instead of 20 random forum threads and bug reports. Sorry for the inconvenience. :)

  3. Noxius
    November 16th, 2009 at 16:19 | #3

    on 9.11 alpha2 (atv version) if i choose another scrapper / tvrage.com (via set content), it doesn’t update either, stil trying thetvdv.com

    21:17:45 T:55276032 M: 29511680 DEBUG: FileCurl::Close(0×312a060) http://www.thetvdb.com/api/1D62F2F90030C444/series/84024/all/en.zip
    21:17:45 T:55276032 M: 29511680 ERROR: InternalGetEpisodeList: Unable to retrieve web site
    21:17:45 T:55276032 M: 29528064 DEBUG: Not adding item to library as no info was found :(

  4. SplasPood
    November 16th, 2009 at 20:49 | #4

    @Noxius
    Heh, well glad to know it’s not just me! I was hoping they’d be back up today, but so far it doesn’t seem to be. When I get home I’m gonna hunt down where the scraper is configured and try manually modifying the config.

  5. Jezz_X
    November 16th, 2009 at 23:41 | #5

    Noxius this is pure guess on my part because I’m no programmer but its probably because you are trying to update an existing show in your database and the URL for the show has allready been stored and being reused.
    What you would need to do is set content to none clean the library, and then set the content again so it would know to use the tvrage scraper and its urls

  6. SplasPood
    November 17th, 2009 at 01:46 | #6

    @Jezz_X
    Ahh, thats likely my problem. Would this force it to re-scrape everything?

  7. boof
    November 17th, 2009 at 10:20 | #7

    At the moment if xbmc can’t scrape the show from the web – it’s not added (silent failure) to the library database.

    Can’t or shouldn’t it at least still add the show? Just with no info available?

  8. compudaze
    November 17th, 2009 at 13:45 | #8

    Try removing the source and re-adding it. When re-adding it, choose another scraper. You will have to update library to re-add everything.

  9. Heroldjensen
    November 17th, 2009 at 18:02 | #9

    Phew, nice to find this post after having setup XBMC tonight, and not being able to scrape Tv Shows ty..

  10. November 18th, 2009 at 11:03 | #10

    The image used for this article is awesome.

  11. azido
    November 20th, 2009 at 23:07 | #11

    which btw brings me back to the ticket spiff closed ungracefully: if you already have all your data stored (and exported) locally (INCLUDING ACTOR THUMBS!!) there should be NO ONLINE CHECKING AT ALL when you scrape for new content for tv-shows. but xbmc still does, thus making it unable to scrape in a show to let’s say a fresh installed xbmc or another copy of xbmc on a local network.

    THIS NEEDS TO BE FIXED!

  12. azido
    November 20th, 2009 at 23:11 | #12

    sorry if that sounds a bit rude, but i felt angry for being misunderstood what the intention of my ticket was and that it points to a behaviour xbmc shouldn’t have (looking up for actor thumbs remotely if they are already present locally, scraped in by xbmc previously and exported to go inside the show dir.) even according to spiff’s comment local files should always override remote ones and have priority.

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