Am logging this partly so that I'll be able to find the work around if I have this problem again and the other part is to seek an explanation of how the scraper works. For info, I was using MC ver 18.0.51.
It's taken me a little while to get a sufficiently complete picture of how to resolve Movie / TV metadata scraping problems. The forum posts and wikis I've found to be lacking in terms of a complete guide with troubleshooting tips in the event that the scraper doesn't work.
By way of worked example, here's a summary of the resolution that is bleedingly obvious to me now but may not be for a noob. So, if you're reading this from that perspective, hopefully this helps. I've drawn it out in greater detail to be as explicit as possible. For those already at the top of the class, please skim ahead:
1. Recorded a TV show Warriors - Richard the Lionheart;
2. Manually ran "Get Movie & TV Info" from the right mouse button control;
3. Scrape returned an array of Movie database entries;
4. Entered command Edit > Tag or Alt+Enter and changed Media Subtype in the Tag menu from "Movie" to "TV Show";
5. Manually ran "Get Movie & TV Info" command;
6. Scrape failed with this error message - "Some of the selected files are not eligible for 'Get Movie & TV Info' because Television shows must have a series name ...";
7. Navigated to
http://www.thetvdb.com/ and did a search for Warriors to find that the series is logged in the database as "Warriors (BBC)";
8. Renamed the recorded file to that title verbatim and include the season and episode info, followed by a space. In this case the filename was changed to read, "Warriors (BBC) S01E01";
9. Manually ran "Get Movie & TV Info" and scrape failed with the same error message as step 6;
10. Edited Tag data as per Step 4 and entered "Warriors (BBC)" into the Series tag field because it was blank;
11. Manually ran "Get Movie & TV Info" and scrape failed error message - "Some of the selected files are not eligible for 'Get Movie & TV Info' because Television shows must have a numeric Season and Episode value"
12. Edited Tag data as per Step 4 and entered "1" into the Season tag field and "1" into the Episode tag field because they were both blank;
13. Manually ran "Get Movie & TV Info" and scrape was successful.
So, after all that, can anyone offer up why I had to go about this in such a long handed way?
Why didn't MC look to the filename and scrape the relevant data correctly after step 4 above?
Am I expecting too much of the software here or have I missed flicking a switch in the software somewhere? At least now I understand how to work around the lack of Tag field data by manually making metadata entries.
This piece around TV Specials is also a gem of info that has frustrated me prior:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=70172.0When I get the chance, I'll test it out. Hopefully it all makes sense.
Enjoy your MC-ing ...