Question About Moviebase Backup Format

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1

Hi Chris,

I hope you will not mind if I ask you a detail question about the format of the Moviebase backup files. As I told you earlier, I have been writing a program to extract csv lists from a Moviebase backup json. I think I understand the format of the backup very well, and I have all my list extracts working great, except one. My question is about the episode watch history. For almost all of the lists, both Moviebase standard lists and user defined lists, the individual items within the list definition in the json each starts with a mediaID identifier that can be matched with the detail item lists for movies, TV shows, and TV show episodes at the end of the json. I have all that working great. But for the TV Show episode watched list (episode watch history), the items in the list look very different. Many of the episode items have no MediaID entry at the beginning. Instead they start with the ShowId. Most do contain the season number and episode number, so I guess they can be matched with the episode titles in the episode list at the end of the json on that basis, but many are also missing season number.

I’m wondering if it is intentional to leave the mediaID off these entries or is it an error in the backup files. Obviously, having the mediaID makes it much easier to find the matching episode entries to retrieve episode titles, etc. And for entries that don’t have either mediaID or season number, there is really no way I can see to find a match.

Any feedback on this would be much appreciated.

Thanks

2

Chris,

In case my questions / comments weren’t clear, I wanted to provide some screenshots to illustrate what I am seeing. I have 31287 episodes in my watched episodes history in my Moviebase backup file. Of those items, fewer than 1000 have an included mediaID. Instead they look like this:

Moviebase Backup Watched Episode List 1
Moviebase Backup Watched Episode List 1485×717 56 KB

The ones that seem to be formatted properly look like this:

Moviebase Backup Watched Episode List 2
Moviebase Backup Watched Episode List 2472×699 50.8 KB

I really have doubts that restoring from a backup that looks like this would work properly. It’s hard to see how all the episode entries would be reestablished with this input.

Shouldn’t all the items in the watched episode list start with a mediaID, as some of them do and as all items in other types of lists do?

Thanks for reviewing this. I am concerned that the Moviebase backups may not contain everything needed for a proper restore.