Just to be clear, I'm not the developer, nostra is. I can only tell what I've learned from using the program. Bear in mind this is the hobby effort of one individual, and the TVDb plugin is one of many. Also, as good as it is for some things, it's not a source everyone will need or want to use. It, or other software that uses it exclusively (like
TV Rename) are not likely to be model for all aspects of handling series.
Don't ask me how (I haven't tried it myself), if
TV Rename writes sidecar data files, you might be able to import those using the
Text file import plugin. There's also a plugin or script for importing local images (perhaps just posters), but I'm less sure how practical that might be.
I use
Sick Beard for handing series. Like
TV Rename, it's open source and no longer actively supported, but it works. And while I'm not familiar with
TV Rename, it may do more. It looks for torrents of new episodes, works with my torrent client to download them, renames and moves them, and gets all the TVDb data (including images)—all automatically. Even so, I don't find it too difficult to maintain the same information in PVD using the plugin. It won't get the episode images, but they're generally crappy anyway. I prefer to let PVD automatically create some screenshots. I then choose one to use as a poster, and delete the rest. I suppose the other reason I don't mind this approach is I need to run the IMDb plugin to get the people data anyway. I run both as a batch for updating episodes.
My point is, I could suggest PVD do what
Sick Beard does, or to be integrated with it so they can be used seamlessly together. I don't, because I don't expect others to adapt to my personal preferences—including those who use
TV Rename or something else. What's important is that it provide the tools necessary to adapt to any reasonable situation. It can create series records using several sources and add data from sidecar files. It's file scanner can easily match episode files named by any systematic naming routine.
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).
I'm not sure, but maybe the better result I get is from running the TVDb plugin first.
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.
Don't use the filename as input! It only takes a moment to
Add a series by entering it's name and running the plugin. Once the series records are created, the file scanner will properly match the files.