XBMC not scraping any tv show episodes anymore

About a month ago I used MediaCompanion to scan all my tv shows & movies. After this, XBMC does not scrape any tv show episodes anymore. It does still scrape movies.

MediaCompanion itself does still work fine when searching for new episodes, but I would like for XBMC to pick them up without any intervention from MediaCompanion.

Whatever i do within XBMC does not work: automatically scanning when starting xbmc, manually right clicking & 'scan for new content', right clicking & tv show information & refresh, cleaning library, rebuilding library, doing above stuff in either the library or just 'video > files', doing it for 'series' as a whole, or individually per tv show ; nothing ...

I do realize this might be more of an issue with XBMC than MediaCompanion itself, but this behavior only started after i scanned my whole collection with MediaCompanion.

So what do i need to do to let XBMC scrape all the shows automatically without any intervention from MediaCompanion? Remove all .nfo files? Only tvshow.nfo files? Something else?

To be clear: all the folder structures & naming conventions are correct. XBMC is set up correct too. For example: the folder 'E:\series' is added in XBMC, content is set as tv-show & settings are set as 'automatic scan', default tvdb as scraper. Naming convention is for example: 'E:\series\Doctor Who (2005)\Season 5\doctor_who_2005.s05e07.mkv'.

MediaCompanion is the latest version at v3.293. XBMC is Camelot 9.11, used with Windows 7 64bit. All files reside at an internal NTFS harddrive.

I'm new to MediaCompanion & wonder if this intended/default behavior.
Any solutions or help with troubleshooting this would be very appreciated.

Thanks.

Having exactly the same issue than you, all new episodes are not anymore recognized by Xbmc...
Any explanations on that?
THanks for your support !

I still haven't figured out a solution for this problem.

What I can add is that even after scanning & scraping new tv episodes with MediaCompanion, XBMC still does not add the new episodes, even after trying to manually update the library in several different ways (update library, scan for new content, tv show information > refresh: both for all series, 1 tv show, 1 season, ...).
There's definitely something wrong here, but I cannot pinpoint the problem.

Another update, but still not the solution:

I removed all the .nfo files for all the tv shows. Then rescanned the whole tv show collection with MediaCompanion. Then I removed all my tv shows in xbmc (set content to nothing, then reset it to tv shows), Naturally, all episodes were added.

But again, after adding a new episode (for example "stargate universe.s01e18.title.mkv"), xbmc did not add it to its library. Not automatically at start-up, not when doing "scan for new content", not when refreshing via "tv show information".
So then I scanned it again with MediaCompanion, episode got recognized. But again, after starting xbmc, it did not recognize it automatically, although it does scan for new content at start-up.

But now - probably important! - something different happened:
While xbmc did not recognize the new episode (from both stargate & doctor who) while doing the automatic scan at start-up (after having scraped the episode with MediaCompanion) ; it did recognize both episodes when I individually clicked each tv-show & picked "scan for new content".

Also, xbmc flawlessy imports & scans a tv-show into its library when i did not scrape anything with MediaCompanion.
So the only difference here are the .nfo files created by MediaCompanion. Somehow these files inhibit xbmc from recognizing new episodes.

I would really like some help with this issue. I've done my utmost best to describe my problem, all the surrounding issues & troubleshooting steps. So please let me know if I'm the only one with this problem.
Either something is wrong with the way my system is set up ; I expect different behavior from MediaCompanion, or this must be a bug of somekind.
If something isn't clear with my explanation in this post or the posts above, please ask for a clarification, I'd be glad to clarify.

I'm at the end of my troubleshooting skills right now. My only recourse now would be to ditch MediaCompanion, remove all .nfo files it created & trust on xbmc's ability to export .nfo files & see what that gives.

Really, all help would be greatly appreciated. Don't hold back on asking for more information. I'd really like some input on this.

This to me sounds like an issue I was having some time ago perhaps 1 year or so.

A show previously scanned & recognised in XBMC would not accept new episodes unless the entire TVShow was deleted & rescanned by XBMC. It is as if the original TVShow was scanned & had a different show ID, thus when it found new episodes the ID didn't match & they where not added.

At the time there was an issue where the hash of the folder on XBMC would indicate that nothing had changed when infact it had, so it didn't think there was any new episodes to add. Has anyone looked at the XBMC lof file to see whats happening?

I haven't had any issues recently however, but I haven't updated my library for a week or so. I will try that & report back.

Cheers

I am having a problem very similar to this. I only just started using MC and XBMC last week, so yes I am a newb, but I am also switching from boxee. Now I installed XBMC and it used the default settings to scrape all my tvshows. Library mode worked, and it was great. I wanted more information, and beter controle over the pictures and such, so I then rescraped with MC, and readded my tv show folder. Library mode see's the tv shows, the discriptions, the thumbnails, fan art, and it all looks great, except it no longer detects my episodes. It cannot be my naming convention as this work fine before i scrapped with MC. For reference though, this is my naming scheme:

TV Shows/
show/
season 1/
showname.S01E01
Season 2/
showname.S02e01
etc...

The only thing i can think of is that MC reads the folder, cannot see the Season 1 and Season 2 folders, so the paths it rights to the .nfo are showing no episodes, and XBMC reads from the .nfo

is my logic correct? could this be an issue? if not will deleting the .nfo files correct the problem, and then i can just get xbmc to scrap for everything but the thumbs and fan art?

(forgive grammer and spelling, im at work and trying to type this quickly.)

so i was looking on the XBMC website, and i found this:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=74223&referrerid=0

Is it possible that MC is writing the <episodeguide> tag wrong? has this been corrected in gen2? should i maybe just try the beta of gen2?

I can confirm the issue is still appearing even with newest release of XBMC SVN, I would even say that it's worst now: when I'm Scanning for new source in TV shows in Season session.. all the content of the season is getting out from the list.
That for saying that I'm looking forward Plex 0.9 for putting that XBMC stuff into my Mac bin, sorry to say. Actually I was differenciated my Kids movies/series from my own on XBMC and PLEX.

So I manually changed the .nfo to read as the wiki says it should, and it worked. XBMC read all of my episodes and it was great. I then pressed info on an episode of Castle, and it grabbed it no problem. Now though, whereas all my episodes where being read no problem before i pressed info, now all of my tv shows read as episodes of castle. I am guessing I had the idea of changing the .nfo correct, but i didn't do it properly. For now i just used media companion to do all of the fan art/poster scrapping, then deleted the .nfo and got xbmc to scrap for episode information.

I hope someone else can find a better fix, but for now, this is the best i can do.

mrousseaux wrote:

so i was looking on the XBMC website, and i found this:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=74223&referrerid=0

Is it possible that MC is writing the <episodeguide> tag wrong? has this been corrected in gen2? should i maybe just try the beta of gen2?

Thanks mrousseaux, seems we're getting somewhere here.

I tried the same with the tv show "The Big Bang Theory". While xbmc did not recognize new episodes (the whole second season) neither at start up while auto-scanning, nor when doing the "scan for new content", nor refreshing the tv-show information. Xbmc did recognize the new episodes from Season 2 after i removed the tvshow.nfo file.

After that I tried your method, so first I removed the whole of "big bang theory" from my xbmc library.
Then I changed the following in tvshow.nfo:

Code:

  <episodeguide>http://www.thetvdb.com/api/6E82FED600783400/series/80379/all/en.zip</episodeguide>

into

  <episodeguide><url cache="80379.xml">http://www.thetvdb.com/api/6E82FED600783400/series/80379/all/en.zip</episodeguide>

After restarting xbmc, it recognized all episodes at start-up.

The only hick-up now is that Xbmc does not use the correct title for this tv-show in the library. While it should show it as "The Big Bang Theory", it's now findable under "61"

So i think yes, MediaCompanion writes the <episodeguide> tag incorrectly, because the <url cache="...xml"> tag should be added within it.
But now there's something weird going on with the naming of the tv-show. I'm scratching my head as to why "61", the title tag is still correct.

Sorry, forget what I said above about the incorrect naming of the tv-show.
I forgot to add the closing </url> tag.

After removing the show again, adding the closing tag to the .nfo file & adding the show again, it shows up correctly as "The Big Bang Theory".

So to summarize:
MediaCompanion writes this in the tvshow.nfo tag:

Code:

  <episodeguide>http://www.thetvdb.com/api/6E82FED600783400/series/80379/all/en.zip</episodeguide>

Xbmc somehow does not recognize this & thus cannot scan for new episodes, because the <url cache="...xml"> ... </url> tag is missing within the <episodeguide> tag. The correct way is this:

Code:

  <episodeguide><url cache="80379.xml">http://www.thetvdb.com/api/6E82FED600783400/series/80379/all/en.zip</url></episodeguide>