Five providers existed and none covered the "video" kind, so every movie
and show got a title from its filename and nothing else - no poster, no
plot, no cast, no year. That is the gap between "a folder of videos with a
nice web UI" and a media server.
TMDB keeps films and television in separate namespaces behind separate
endpoints, and a Query does not say which one it is. Rather than guessing
from the title, Search asks both at once and merges by TMDB popularity,
which is the only ranking signal available without a second request per
item.
Speed is the point, so the two requests run concurrently over one derived
context on a single shared client, and whichever fails first cancels the
other: one dead endpoint cannot hold the result hostage while the healthy
one is waited out. Verified red-green - serialising the two fetches makes
TestTMDBSearchesConcurrently fail at 2s.
Two corrections made in review, both found by reading the code rather than
trusting the report:
1. ExternalID was the bare TMDB id, so film 603 and show 603 - different
works - would have been stored identically in provider_ids. Namespaced
as movie/603 and tv/603. Nothing resolves an item from an external_id
today, so this was latent rather than broken, but the table is populated
as enrichment runs and correcting it later would have needed a data
migration. Pinned by TestTMDBExternalIDIsNamespaced.
2. Query.Year was added but never populated, so the year filter - the main
way to tell a remake from the original - never applied. catalog.Item
already carried Year; the enricher now passes it.
No cover bytes are fetched here: the provider returns image URLs and the
existing enricher caches what it uses. A missing key logs the env var and
skips, so the feature is discoverable from the boot log.
Not verified: the live TMDB API. Tests run against httptest servers only.