[Torrent911] Inception.2010.TRUEFRENCH.1080p.BluRay.x264-YIFY
That's a real filename. The goal: extract "Inception" and "2010" from it, query the TMDB API (The Movie Database, the open reference for film and TV metadata), and display the right card. Poster, rating, synopsis. Automatically, for a library of a few hundred files.
Context: a self-hosted PHP media server. Think Plex, but lighter, no cloud, no account. The interface looks vaguely like Netflix. The hard part is automatic recognition. Torrent release names follow no formal standard: [Torrent911] can come before the title, TRUEFRENCH can interrupt it, a release group trails at the end. Films have a year. TV shows almost never do. Popular anime have episode numbers with four digits: One.Piece.S01E1164.VOSTFR.
I had accumulated 39,188 real torrent names over the years: 22,058 films, 17,130 series. Enough to build an honest test bench. I used an AI assistant to replay variants quickly and analyze where the metrics leaked.
Two things happened. First, a clean data-driven optimization: measure, iterate, stop at the right time. Then, a classic trap: the benchmark was green while a silent bug turned every single TV show into a film match.
