Do you want to understand The Movie Database better? How does it improve Kodi? How do you setup your own API Key? We have all of those answers and more in our guide.

August 14th: The admin of TMDb has issued a statement about the Search and Discover endpoints not working. This is causing disruption in most or all Kodi addons and APKs.



TMDb is continuing to have some issues with the API, specifically the search and discover endpoints.

There is an unprecedented traffic spike that has been hitting the API over the past few days and one particular service is not designed for this load. For technical reasons, this service is not able to scale out like the rest of the infrastructure and under this load, it’s going down and taking the API with it. As a bandaid fix, I have disabled the search and discover endpoints. I understand that this is not ideas. As soon as I have an update I will post one.

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TMDB is a popular database for movie and TV information. The TMDB API Key allows you to access this database and pull in information such as titles, posters, plot for nearly every movie and TV show in existence. As well, it supplies categories such as Popular, Top Rated, Now Playing, etc.

Kodi addons use these categories and information as well, since they are nothing more than google search engines and provide or host no content of their own.

Recently, users have been reporting that their Categories have not been working on Covenant, Elysium, and other popular addons. When you try to open one, say “Most Popular”, it will try to load for a second and then fail. When this happens, the TMDB API Key is down. TMDB has recently started to block APIs who send excessive requests to their server, which happens when addon become to popular.

In order to make your Kodi categories more reliable, create your own API key below and add the information into your Kodi settings.

How to Create Your Own TMDB API Key

Go to the TMDB website and sign up for a free account. Once you are logged in, click your Profile Icon in the top right corner and then select Settings. On the left side menu click API and then click Create in the middle of your screen. Fill out this form asking you for your address, phone number, and other information. You can use real or fake information, it doesn’t matter. At the end of this screen when you submit the information, you will be given a TMDB API Key.

How to Add TMDB API Key into Covenant & Elysium

Launch the Covenant or Elysium Kodi addon. Select Tools > SETTINGS: Accounts. Under TMDB, click on API Key and enter in the code you were given above.

How to Add TMDB API Key into Metahandler Settings

The Metahandler service works behind the scenes to display meta data within your Kodi skin. If you have a personal API Key, entering it into the metahandler settings is highly recommend and only takes a moment:

From your Kodi main menu, navigate to SYSTEM > Add-ons > SYSTEM > Dependencies > Metahandler > Configure Add your personal API Key under TMDB and enable the Override option.

And that’s it, you will now have access to all of the Categories and Playlists provided by each addon again.

Let us know on Twitter or Facebook if we can help you out!

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