Hi Rick,
Thanks for your prompt reply.
Let me check if I understand what you're saying (and what I am thinking / wondering):
1) The TDV plugin does a search by Title (as does TV rename). This would return the TVDB seriesid (and if we could store that somewhere like the IMDB number that would set us off, I guess?).
2) TDV allowes you to get an overall overview of all episodes of a show (something like:
http://thetvdb.com/?tab=seasonall&id=73200&lid=7). So if that is used by the plugin (is it?) I would end up with a complete overview of all episodes of the show.
3) TV rename also pulls out the artwork if available per season and per episode. Hence it must be possible. But if I understand it correct the plugin doesn't (as yet) support this?
So, with the plugin as is, the procedure is: run TVDB plugin on the show (I did, but the title matching came up with nothing); then run IMDB per season to get the details (I do, but I run IMDB as step 1 also). The net effect of what I do is the large number (from my point unnecessary) entries in the dialog. By this I mean that when the dialog list is build, checking it with the known Title of the season would eliminate nearly always all other options in the dialog list, resulting in one (the correct one) that could be chosen automatically.
I understand your point about the filename and the database record. The question there was how do I get a correct record in the database given that I use my filename (see format in the previous post) as the input. From the little I know of regex my guess was that the expression would correctly result in a valid title/season/episode and hence a valid record in the database. Would you agree?
To wrap it up: TV rename seems to do a nice job naming files based on TVDB (the source code is available). A great program like PVD could benefit from an approach like TV rename is using to get the series handling done easier(i.e. getting large numbers of records in the database without much handwork). TV rename just scans all folders, looks up show name, season, episode from TVDB and downloads all TVDB information. With that it can update the filenames and stores images and other episode data in XML.
Maybe I have it completely wrong or am I lacking the knowledge, so excuse me but I really like to understand. Thanks.