RMVOD, upstream data, and new features

 I don't know if this is permanent or not... but there definitely seems to be a *period* of development arriving, where the big, exciting features of which users would be readily aware are fading out, and it's more... stuff administrators would appreciate.  

I was recently in contact with Brian who maintains the OMDb API (https://www.omdbapi.com/) which allows weirdos like me to have a source of "Movie Database" content available via a simple API.  I've supported him (nominally) on Patreon for a while... you can access the api for free, but you're throttled to some number of requests per day, but if you sign up for his Patron, you can get many more requests per day.  Recently my script that I'd written to scrape "Movie Database" data from the Internet (not using Brian's API) has been throwing errors, and I think it's because the "Movie Database" I'd been hitting for TV Series Episode data didn't like getting scraped by a bot... so, they started sending me 403s.  

That's when I reached out to Brian and asked him if there was a way to get series episode data from his API... and almost immediately, he was like, "You mean *this*?" with a link to  page outlining an as-yet unpublished endpoint on the API which returns the Episodes for a Season of a TV Series.  Well... I was over the moon... I said, yes, that appears to be just the thing.  Then I tried it out, and discovered there appeared to be a bug in the way it linked episodes to the "series" entity.  I tried it out a couple different ways, made some notes, and told Brian I think I found a bug.  He dove right in and within a few days, the "unpublished" series data endpoint was working properly.

So, now, I have a "one button" solution in the RMVOD UI for populating all the data for the Episodes of a TV Series.  The thing is, this feature is not something "normal viewers" are going to care about or use.  From the standpoint of an administrator... the person who has to maintain a local instance of RMVOD, this is a boon.  To someone only concerned with "What is there to watch", this feature doesn't matter.  I think this is the character of features that will be coming down the pipe for the foreseeable future.

There will be a new "tag" coming soon, which will include the feature outlined above.  If you have an existing set-up, the new features will require a DB update (adding a table), which is not automated.  If you're incomfortable running SQL from the command line and you don't have an instance of RMVOD set up, then you might want to wait, as a fresh install will have the new table.  

The current tag/release is here:  https://github.com/taobear68/rmvod/releases/tag/v0.9.0 if you want to give it a try.