Category: SickBeard

Sickbeard and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert

My Sickbeard doesn’t like it, and doesn’t find it when it’s out there.  Turns out the problem is how it’s being named out there in usenet land, and Sickie can’t figure it out.  It also turns out Sickie has an exceptions database just for handling these sorts of situations.  Problem is, this database doesn’t get updated very often.  Good news is, you can update it yourself!

The database is cache.db, found in the program directory for Sickbeard.  To add to this file you need to use a SQLite shell interface.  You can see basic information on obtaining and using the shell interface on a previous post here.

Once you’re ready to go, fire up your interface from a command line:

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SQLite3.exe

Open the database (Pay attention to pathing.  In this example I’m already working from within the directory containing cache.db) :

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.open cache.db

And use the following to insert “Stephen Colbert” as a general search term:

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INSERT INTO scene_exceptions (exception_id,tvdb_id,show_name,provider) VALUES (9999,289574,'Stephen Colbert','custom_provider');

Breaking down this line a bit: 9999 is the exception ID you’re assigning to this exception.  We’re just looking to get past all the existing exceptions without conflict.  As of this writing my scene_exceptions table has 777 legit autofilled exceptions defined in it.  289574 is the TVDB.com ID for the Late Show,  the next field is a the search term to be used for the show name (Stephen Colbert), and the final field is the provider, which is the tvdb.

Restart Sickbeard.

Toying with the SickBeard database – SQLite

I’m moving around a bunch of data managed by SickBeard because I’m running out of drive space.  While SickBeard nicely allows for mass changes, it isn’t so friendly when it comes to gleaning certain information, such as a list of shows that reside in a common path.  SQL to the rescue.

Currently SickBeard uses SQLite as its default database.  Head to SQLite’s download page and grab the appropriate copy of the command line shell (in my case, Precompiled Binaries for Windows).  Stick it in the install path for SickBeard, where sickbeard.db resides.  Because I like to be safe I made a copy of my database, which I named sickbeard_2.db, just in case I did something stupid and broke it.

In a CMD window, path to the aforementioned location and fire up SQLite:

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SQLite3.exe

Open the database with

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.open filename.db

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You can list tables simply with

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.tables

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We’re after the information found in the tv_shows table. Want to see the columns in that table?

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pragma table_info(tv_shows);

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This simple query gets me what I am after, which is all the shows located in the Toons directory:

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SELECT location, show_name FROM tv_shows WHERE location LIKE '%Toons%';

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To dump the data to a file rather than to the screen:

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.mode csv
.output FILE.csv
SELECT location, show_name FROM tv_shows WHERE location LIKE '%Toons%';
.output stdout

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Find FILE.csv in the directory containing SQLite3 and the db.