Turning off 'Enable video info search' has removed all media metadata

[NasNovice]

Hi guys,

I did a quick search but couldn't find the answer. I'm quite a novice at all things NAS and Synology.

I have set up Video Station with a number of my favourite films and media and spent quite a few hours organising it and making it look nice in Video Station.
I'm on DSM 6.2.xx. Recently got an update for Video Station so with out reading much about it updated to the new version.

Then discovered that I no longer have direct access to TMDB with out making my own API key, which I didn't need in the previous version.
In the process of getting one., but..

I decided I don't want VS scraping the internet all the time so I tried switching off 'Enable video info search' via settings in VS. and VS automatically seems to have removed all the metadata I had for those media folders!!! It doesn't make sense to me that switching off video info search also entails deleting all previous results!!

Is there a way to retreive the previous metadata without having to scrape TMDB again!!!????

Thanks for any help

 

[fredbert]

Welcome to the forum.

Removing tagging makes no sense. Did you export the tags to .vsmeta files? Because if you did then open each library and saving will automatically parse .vsmeta.

What Synology has done is to remove the direct support for TMDB and TVDB. This used to use their own API keys and TVDB said they got too much traffic from VS users: it was always your VS scrapping the Internet, never a Synology service. So Synology changed it so that we had to create accounts at both sites and request API keys. Then TVDB deprecated and deactivated their old API version and Synology didn't code up support for the new one. This left only TMDB for both movie and TV.

This was covered here.

Video Station v2.4.9 - now needs *DB API keys to add tags

Version: 2.4.9-1626 (2020-06-09) What's New Supports configuring the information sources with the Video Info Auto Search feature. Bug Fixed Fixed the issue where videos played via a public sharing link might be stuck in the loading status during video playback. Fixed the issue where the...

www.synoforum.com

The TMDB API key that was revealed in Synology's how-to still works. Or you just ask for one yourself from TMDB.

 

[NasNovice]

Thanks for your reply @fredbert , appreciate it.

The main reason I switched off video info search was that I erroneously thought that it was stopping me from exporting metadata.

I did these steps...
1. Exported metadata using the method you've outlined. then waited for it to do its thing, but after a week when I went back into DSM, I could see that the vsmeta files had not appeared yet! I tried again and nothing happened. I saw that in the settings VS was tellign me that it was indexing.
2. Not understanding the process I switched off video info search thing that it was holding up the export process.

So what doesn't make sense is that when I switch it off, VS has gone and removed the metadata I had. Its not something I would have thought would happen.

Interestingly in another video folder where I hadn't switched info search off, I managed to export the metadata successfully. This was after numerous reboots of my NAS and switching VS on and off several times. At some point VS correctly exported metadata for that 2nd folder... Great! So I tested switching off and back on the info search on that folder, and although I have a vsmeta file for each video, VS is not displaying the info! So is this a bug? FYI I have switched on info search again, but it doesn't seem to be loading the exported metadata...

Thanks for the link to the other post. Its also quite helpful regarding a temporary API key.
Thanks a lot for your help

 

[fredbert]

Do you have a HB task that backs up VS configuration? Maybe reinstalling it will bring back the database? It's a very long shot.

 

[NasNovice]

Do you have a HB task that backs up VS configuration? Maybe reinstalling it will bring back the database? It's a very long shot.

Sadly not yet. It is on the list of things to learn how to do!!!
It's a great suggestion. I'll get that sorted for future protection..