The Vietnamese TVB Database I Probably Didn't Need to Build
TVB was a pretty big part of my childhood.
Growing up, my family would rent Vietnamese-dubbed Hong Kong dramas every week. We'd bring home a stack of VHS tapes, put one on, and watch them religiously.
It was just part of the routine.
Every week there'd be another drama to watch, another set of characters to get invested in, and another Vietnamese title that I'd end up remembering for years.
I didn't know the English titles. I didn't know the original Chinese titles, and honestly, I didn't really care. I just knew these shows by the Vietnamese names.
Those were the names I grew up hearing.
Fast forward a couple of decades and I've ended up with a pretty ridiculous collection of Vietnamese-dubbed TVB and ATV dramas on my Plex server. A lot of it comes from old VHS, VCD and DVD releases that I've collected over the years.
At some point I decided it was time to properly organise the whole thing.
I wanted Plex to match everything correctly, get the right posters and metadata, and generally stop having a library full of shows that were impossible to identify.
I thought this would be a pretty straightforward cleanup job.
It wasn't.
The Vietnamese title problem
The first problem I ran into was that a lot of the Vietnamese titles simply aren't recognised by modern databases.
If you're dealing with the popular TVB dramas, it's usually not too difficult. Search for the Vietnamese title and you'll probably find something. There are enough people who've written about them, enough websites that have documented them, and enough information floating around that you can usually work backwards to the original series.
It's when you start getting into the more obscure stuff from the 80s and 90s that things get difficult.
I'd have a show in my collection called Đôi Bửu Quỷ Quyệt.
I know that title.
If you grew up watching Vietnamese-dubbed TVB, there's a good chance you might recognise it too.
But try searching for some of the really obscure ones.
Take Bát Tiên Quá Hải, for example.
The English title is actually Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea, a 1985 TVB drama.
But search for Bát Tiên Quá Hải and you'll get a whole bunch of results about the Eight Immortals themselves rather than the TV series.
The Vietnamese title exists. People know it. People watched the show.
The problem is that modern databases and search engines don't necessarily know that Bát Tiên Quá Hải is the Vietnamese name for Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea.
So I'd start adding things like "TVB" or "phim bộ" to my searches and digging through whatever I could find.
Sometimes I'd get lucky.
Sometimes I'd end up clicking through page after page of completely unrelated results.
And sometimes the best thing I'd find was a random eBay listing selling a VCD or VHS of the series.
No English title.
No Chinese title.
No useful metadata.
Just a photo of the cover and a Vietnamese title.
And I'd be sitting there thinking:
Okay... I guess I'm working with this.
😂
I'd have to compare the cover, look at the actors, search for other references to the Vietnamese title and try to work backwards to the original Hong Kong series.
Sometimes I'd find an old website or forum post that finally gave me the answer.
Other times I'd find an old forum post from 2004 with one person asking what the English name of a show was, three replies saying "I think it's this one", and absolutely nothing else.
I'd get through a dozen or so and feel pretty good about myself.
Then I'd look at the remaining list.
There were still about 1,400 shows.
That's when I realised:
Fuck, this is going to take forever.
So I threw everything at Claude
At that point I decided I needed some help.
I had all these old poster images sitting in my collection, so I started feeding batches of them to Claude and asking it to identify the shows, pull out the Chinese and English titles and match them to the original productions.
Let's just say I ripped through a lot of tokens doing this.
😂
But it actually worked surprisingly well.
Claude managed to identify a massive chunk of the collection and gave me a really good head start.
Some posters were easy. They had Chinese characters, English titles, recognisable actors or enough information to work out what the show was.
Then there were the posters that looked like they'd survived a nuclear war.
Some of these scans are absolutely terrible. Tiny VHS covers, blurry VCD artwork, faded text, heavily compressed JPEGs and posters that have clearly been copied and re-copied over the years.
Even Claude struggled with some of them.
There were plenty of times where I'd throw a poster at it and basically get:
"I have no idea what this is."
😂
So AI got me through a huge amount of the initial work, but it definitely wasn't a magic button.
There was still a massive amount that needed to be manually reviewed.
I'd have to check the matches, look at the actors, verify the Chinese titles, search old websites and figure out whether the suggested series was actually the right one.
And that's where this project started getting much bigger than my Plex library.
So I built a catalogue
Once I had all this information sitting around, I thought:
Why am I keeping this just for myself?
If I'm already spending all this time figuring out what these Vietnamese titles actually are, I might as well make the information useful to other people.
So I started building a proper site.
NERV Phim Bộ Hồng Kông — Vietnamese TVB/ATV Catalogue
What started as a list for my Plex library has now grown into a catalogue of more than 1,300 titles.
Each show can have its Vietnamese title, alternate Vietnamese titles, English title, original Chinese title, broadcast information, network, genre, synopsis, cast, characters and links to TMDb and TVDB.
I've also started building individual pages for each show and connecting the actors together.
At that point, it stopped feeling like a spreadsheet and started feeling like an actual archive.
Then I posted it on Reddit
Once I had something that was actually usable, I posted the site on Reddit.
I made a post on r/HKdramas explaining what I was trying to do and asking Vietnamese TVB fans for help identifying some of the more obscure titles.
Vietnamese TVB fans — looking for some help with a database
That post ended up helping a lot.
Suddenly I wasn't the only person looking at these titles.
People started recognising shows I couldn't identify.
People pointed out alternate Vietnamese names.
People corrected titles.
People remembered different names used by different releases.
And the catalogue started filling out much faster.
But one of the replies really stuck with me.
Someone told me they'd checked out the site and were glad I was building it because they'd been looking for a website exactly like this to help clean up their own collection.
They even said they could already help identify at least 30 of the missing English titles just by looking at the posters.
That was a pretty cool moment.
Up until then, this had mostly been me trying to solve my own stupid Plex problem.
Then someone else basically came along and said:
"Wait, I've been looking for this too."
And that's when it really clicked for me that this wasn't just useful for my own collection.
There are other people out there sitting on the same old Vietnamese-dubbed tapes, VCDs and DVDs, probably dealing with the exact same problem.
It also made me realise just how much of this information lives in the community.
A lot of these Vietnamese titles aren't sitting neatly in a modern database somewhere.
They're in people's memories.
They're on old VCD covers.
They're buried in ancient forum posts.
They're on old websites.
They're in Facebook groups.
And some of those resources are slowly disappearing.
There's another funny part to all of this.
I'm Vietnamese, and I can read and write enough Vietnamese to get around these old websites and actually search for this stuff.
But I'm not good enough to comfortably participate in a lot of the Vietnamese Facebook groups where this information lives.
And that turned out to be a pretty big problem.
I'd eventually find a promising result and click through thinking:
YES. Someone knows what this is.
And then I'd find myself looking at some ancient Facebook post with dozens of comments, all discussing the show in Vietnamese.
😂
I could usually understand enough to work out what was going on, recognise the names and pick out useful information.
But following a long conversation — let alone jumping in and asking questions myself — was a different story.
During my searches I'd constantly end up finding groups with names like Hội Mê Phim Hồng Kông and similar Vietnamese TVB communities.
And honestly, they were incredibly useful.
I'd find posts where someone had asked about some obscure drama, someone had posted a VCD cover, or people were trying to remember what a particular series was called.
Sometimes the exact piece of information I needed was buried in the comments of a random Facebook post from years ago.
The frustrating part was that the information was there.
It just wasn't necessarily accessible to me in a way that was easy to follow, search or contribute to.
I'd be sitting there thinking:
Fuck, I wish I could actually participate in this conversation.
😂
I can read enough Vietnamese to dig through these communities and find useful information, but I'm not at the level where I can comfortably jump into a Vietnamese discussion and start asking people questions.
So in a weird way, that became another reason for building the catalogue.
I might not be able to sit in a Facebook group and have a proper conversation about some obscure 1990s TVB drama, but I can take the information I've managed to find, cross-reference it, verify it, organise it and put it somewhere that's searchable.
And hopefully that makes it a little easier for the next person.
There have been people doing this kind of thing before me. I've found old GeoCities sites, TVB fan pages, collector lists and Vietnamese TVB databases that have been incredibly useful.
They're just often incomplete, difficult to search or haven't been maintained for years.
I started thinking:
What would these sites look like if someone had kept maintaining them into 2026?
That's basically what I'm trying to build.
Then I went down the Hán-Việt rabbit hole
Once the show information started coming together, I started looking at the actors.
Originally, I just wanted the site to show the actor's English name and Chinese name.
Then I started noticing that Vietnamese viewers often have their own names for these actors.
And I realised I didn't really understand where those names came from.
So naturally, I went down another rabbit hole.
The Hán-Việt / Sino-Vietnamese rabbit hole.
I started learning how Chinese names can have a Cantonese pronunciation, a Mandarin pronunciation and a Hán-Việt reading.
For example:
- Lau Ching-wan → Lưu Thanh Vân → 劉青雲
- Joey Meng → Vạn Ỷ Văn → 萬綺雯
- Kent Cheng → Trịnh Tắc Sĩ → 鄭則仕
- Julian Cheung → Trương Trí Lâm → 張智霖
- Chor Yuen → Sở Nguyên → 楚原
At first I thought these were simply Vietnamese translations of the actors' names.
They're not really translations in that sense.
They're different readings of the same Chinese characters.
So:
劉青雲
can be:
Lau Ching-wan in Cantonese
Liú Qīngyún in Mandarin
Lưu Thanh Vân in Hán-Việt
Once I understood that, I started seeing it everywhere.
And then I realised I wanted all of this represented on the site.
If someone knows an actor as Lau Ching-wan, they should be able to find him.
If they know him as Lưu Thanh Vân, they should also be able to find him.
And if they search for the Chinese name, that should work too.
This ended up being one of my favourite parts of the project, because I genuinely didn't set out to learn any of this.
I just wanted Plex to match some TV shows.
And then there's the dubbing rabbit hole
While researching all of this, I also started learning more about the Vietnamese dubbing groups.
USLT.
FFVN.
SanYang.
SCTV9.
And others.
That's another rabbit hole entirely.
The same Hong Kong series could have different Vietnamese titles depending on which group released or dubbed it.
And sometimes the voice cast could be completely different too.
There are people who can hear a particular Vietnamese voice and immediately know which actor they're hearing.
For someone who grew up with these shows, that's part of the experience.
I'd eventually like to document more of that history as well.
For now, I'm mostly focused on getting the shows and their Vietnamese identities properly catalogued.
From my Plex library to 1,300+ shows
The funny thing is that this started with me trying to organise my own collection.
Now there are more than 1,300 titles in the catalogue.
I've gone from identifying the shows I personally own to adding shows that aren't even in my collection.
I've built individual show pages.
I've started building a people database.
I've added alternate Vietnamese names.
I've added Hán-Việt actor names.
I've connected shows to TMDb and TVDB.
I've added relationships between related seasons and sequels.
And I've spent an absolutely unreasonable amount of time staring at ancient VCD covers.
😂
But I think the result is actually useful.
If someone searches for an obscure Vietnamese TVB title they've remembered for 20 or 30 years, there's now a chance they'll actually find it.
What's next for the site?
There's still a lot I want to do.
The first thing is simply more titles.
The catalogue started with my own collection, but there are obviously many more Vietnamese-dubbed TVB and ATV dramas out there that I don't have.
I'd like to keep expanding beyond what I personally own and document titles that other people remember.
I also want to improve the Vietnamese release information.
USLT, FFVN, SanYang and the other dubbing groups deserve more attention. I'd like to eventually document which group released which version, what title they used and, where possible, information about the Vietnamese voice cast.
The people database is another area I want to expand.
I'd like actors to have their own proper pages, connecting their English, Chinese and Vietnamese names together and showing all of their appearances in the catalogue.
And then there's the never-ending data cleanup.
There are still titles that need accents.
Alternate names that haven't been discovered.
Actor names that need verifying.
Shows that need better matching.
And plenty of old Vietnamese releases that I haven't even found yet.
So I don't really consider the site finished.
I'm not sure it ever will be.
And that's probably a good thing.
The more people use it, the more corrections and information can be added.
Hopefully, eventually, someone will Google an obscure Vietnamese TVB title they remember from the 90s and end up on one of these pages.
Maybe they're trying to find the English title.
Maybe they're trying to work out the original Chinese name.
Maybe they're trying to match an old VCD to their Plex library.
Or maybe they just want to know what the hell that show they watched as a kid was actually called.
And hopefully the site can just say:
Yep. I know exactly what you're looking for.
That's really all I wanted to build.
