Can I import a TV show without using a scraper?

  • I'm using LibreELEC on a RP5. I have it connected to a hard drive with a TV show on it, about 200 episodes. I don't care about importing fanart/trailers/descriptions or any other kind of metadata, I just want it to import the files so I can play them. Also, due to personal preference, I have custom titles for the episodes that don't follow "scraping database conventions" or whatever. This wouldn't be a problem if I could just import them without using a scraper, but it seems LibreELEC requires one when "setting content" for the TV Show section. The local scraper just doesn't work at all, and my TV show won't appear in the library when I try to use it. The default TMDB scraper automatically renames all my episode titles (most of which it gets wrong), even when I mark it to "keep original title" in the scan settings. Is there anyway around this? I've been futzing with this for hours now and just want it to simply import these episode files in the TV Shows section without it trying to change or add anything.

  • If you want to put content in a Library view (Movies/TVshows) then you MUST scrape the content. If you don't want to scrape from an online source you can provide your own .nfo files (one per episode) and use the offline scraper. If the offline scraper is not doing what you expect; either you have invalid expectations on how it works, or it's disagreeing with content of the files and failing to use them. To triage what might be going on you'll need to share a Kodi debug log so we can see verbose output as the scan/scrape takes place and what info/error messages are generated.

    NB: Each time I see people flailing around trying to get some custom filesystem structure or content to scrape I'm wondering why folks don't just use the 'Videos' non-Library view to find and play media. It's not a fancy view. It will still track watched status. It requires zero config and effort to use.