#548 Shows randomly "locking", and unlocking shows can sometimes cause nfo file to "blank out".

[Trevor P]

For some reason many of my shows became "locked". Don't know why. This started a few months ago and I didn't think anything of it as I thought maybe it had to do with the ongoing TVDB api changes. Would love to know "why" a show can go from normal to locked for no apparent reason.

But that's not the bigger issue.

The bigger issue is when I did "Unlock All Shows" in an attempt to fix what was going on above. After running for a bit, many shows lost ALL of their primary information. Looking at the nfo file, many of them emptied out. ALL fields were either zeroed out or set to null. 150 shows.. blanked. Not good. And that's literally all I did; Unlock All Shows.

I don't have what it was before the error, but here is the result after the unlock:

<tvshow>
<state>0</state>
<title>Citadel</title>
<showtitle>Citadel</showtitle>
<sorttitle>
</sorttitle>
<tagline>
</tagline>
<mpaa>na</mpaa>
<plot>
</plot>
<uniqueid type="tvdb" default="true">
</uniqueid>
<status>missing</status>
<runtime>0 min</runtime>
<userrating>0</userrating>
<year>0000</year>
<premiered>
</premiered>
<studio>-</studio>
<originallanguage>
</originallanguage>
<originaltitle>
</originaltitle>
<trailer>
</trailer>
<tag>
</tag>
<genre>
</genre>
<language>en</language>
<episodeactorsource>imdb</episodeactorsource>
<tvshowactorsource>tvdb</tvshowactorsource>
<sortorder>default</sortorder>
<scrapefrom>tvdb</scrapefrom>
</tvshow>

[Trevor P]

BTW, running 3.7.7.3

[Rob]

Series becoming locked would mean something is overwriting the nfo tag

<state>0</state>

with the value of 1. 1 in the state tag means locked.
Media Companion wouldn't do this by itself, and the nfo you pasted up is the default blank nfo if the series couldn't be scraped.
Again, MC won't do this by itself.
EG: if the nfo can't be read, mc posts an OOPS message, MC will not overwrite the nfo in this case.

But if an external program is altering the nfo, making it unreadable,

I haven't had any other posts about this issue, never seen it myself, and pretty certain MC wouldn't do this itself either.

I'd rather be looking at outside influences like antivirus, or AI editor, etc.

Also, there have been no changes in TVDb api for a number of releases, and if there was, still wouldn't explain this.