tv_tmdb fails inconsistently with 500 error

[BurnsCommaLucas]

For background,

• Ubuntu 24.04
• perl 5.38.2
• xmltv 1.3.0

I'm trying to use tv_tmdb but I'm getting very inconsistent failures. The failure state always appears to be the same, and the error is always

tv_tmdb: TMDB said '500 Can't connect to api.themoviedb.org:443' : cannot continue

The failure doesn't appear to be related to a particular show, movie, channel, or program. Using one known-good guide.xml file, three runs of tv_tmdb < guide.xml > guide_tmdb.xml had completely different success rates. The first made it 7% through the file, the second 19%, and the third 9%. I wondered if my pi-hole server could have something to do with it, but even after changing the DNS settings on my server from the pi-hole to 1.1.1.1,1.0.0.1 there was no improvement.

Is it possible to increase the level of logging by tv_tmdb? I would like to be able to post a more helpful diagnosis than this to get it fixed but I don't see an option for verbosity in the man page for tv_tmdb

[garybuhrmaster]

There is a --debug option. Whether it will help is unknown. The pod indicates that any level greater than 2 is not likely to be helpful, but, perhaps, you can try. Mostly, you need to report 500's to tmdb who can (in theory) correlate errors to their internal logging. Note that almost all sites have implemented various limits due to the AI exploitation, so sometimes you end up being a victim of others abuse, especially of you are using various providers CGNAT implementations.