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[ldoodle]

Hey,

What is the recommended method to handle TV series specials. One that I'm doing now is Only Fools and Horses. The first 3 series have their own Christmas Specials as an episode; for Series 1 it's Episode 7. Get Movie and TV info doesn't find anything for Episode 7, but it's on TheTVDB: http://thetvdb.com/index.php?tab=episode&seriesid=75628&seasonid=23089&id=174101

Then they have loads of independent Christmas Specials, which I've put as Series 8, but no episodes so Get Movie and TV info kicks up a fuss saying a value for Episode must be set.

[Hendrik]

Specials are all in Season 0 on TheTVDB, so you need to look them up from there - for example the episode you linked is Season 0, Episode 1.
What I usually do is edit them temporarily to be Season 0 Episode 1, then do a lookup, and then edit them back to where they belong in the season/episode order.

You can also enter this information in the lookup dialog which comes up when you do lookup on a single file, in the header you can edit the text field which has the season/episode number to pull it from another place.

I've thought about this before, but there doesn't seem to be a good way to automate this.

[ldoodle]

Thanks, that did it.

Can I make a request. Firstly for the Season field, in Theater View, it should prefix the word Season followed by a space, so it shows as Season x, rather than just x.

Secondly, if the season is 0, show it just as Specials, rather than 0!

I know I could do a custom field (help please!), but it should be standard really.

[ldoodle]

Got it:

if(isequal([season], 0, 2), Specials, Season [season])

Anything better?

[Hendrik]

You can use TVInfo(SeasonDisplay), it'll automatically prefix "Season" to numeric values, and leave everything else alone.
So if you have "1" in the field, it'll be "Season 1", but if the Season field contains "Specials", it'll end up as "Specials".

It won't convert empty or 0 to Specials though.

In some shows the special episodes belong into the normal episode watching order, so instead of having to remember when to watch which special, I typically just include them in the normal season, in the proper spot where they need to be watched - I change the Season/Episode after looking up the info from TVDB.
This is typically for british shows, like Doctor Who or Downton Abbey, where the christmas specials are just "normal" episodes that should be watched between the seasons.