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As my library grew, I started to the Netflix problem: ~1900 films in one giant Movies folder and finding something to watch meant scrolling forever past stuff I wasn't in the mood for. I tried genre-based organization, didn't work. Tried decade-based, didn't work. What actually works for how my wife, and I pick films is mood + intent: are we doing date night, demo night, comfort rewatch, or "block out three hours for an Event"? So, I built a PowerShell pipeline that classifies my library into 13 mood/intent-based categories and reorganizes the folder structure for me. After running the result for a few weeks, I'm happy enough with how it works that I figured I'd share in case anyone else has the same problem. What it does: Pulls metadata from TMDb and OMDb for each film Optionally probes file format with MediaInfo CLI (so it knows what's actually 4K vs. just-named-4K) Routes each film into one of 13 categories using a "filter-first" approach: organizational categories like Christmas, Animated, 4K Masters, and Streaming are decided deterministically; the rest compete on a weighted scoring system Plans (and optionally executes) file moves so Emby can present the result as separate libraries per category Optionally consults Claude (via Anthropic's API) for ambiguous calls off by default, costs about a dollar per run if you turn it on The 13 categories: 4K Masters · Animated · Blockbusters · Christmas · Date Night · Event · Horror · Independent · Midnight · Prestige · Serious · Streaming · Studio Each has a specific definition based on browsing intent. For example: Blockbusters = scene-startable comfort rewatches (Back to the Future, Mission Impossible) Event = long-runtime spectacle requiring full-attention commitment (Lawrence of Arabia, Lord of the Rings) 4K Masters = curated demo discs you'd showcase, NOT just "anything I own in 4K format" — the curation is yours, manually maintained in a CSV Midnight = DTV / B-movies / cult curiosities — different from Horror (which is genuine theatrical horror) Setup requirements: Windows with PowerShell 7+ Emby with a movies library Free TMDb and OMDb API keys Optional: MediaInfo CLI, Anthropic API key Setup walkthrough is in the README. Briefly: extract the zip, drop your API keys in a config file, edit one JSON config to point at your library paths, export your library from Emby as a CSV, run the pipeline. First run is "plan only" — file moves are off by default until you've reviewed the proposed sort. Caveats: This is built around how my brain organizes films, not a universal taxonomy. The "Event vs. Blockbusters" line, the "Horror vs. Midnight" line — these are my judgment calls and yours may differ. The system supports per-film overrides for exactly this reason. It assumes Emby + a NAS-backed library. The path-handling logic is Windows-centric. Adapting to Plex or Linux is possible, but I haven't done it. The included calibration set has ~25 universally agreed films just to show the format. Your actual taste calibration is up to you. It's PowerShell. If you're not comfortable in PS, the setup may take more effort. If anyone has a similar setup and wants to swap notes on how they organize their libraries, I love to hear you handle your library EmbyLibraryCurator.zip

Olá tenho a assinatura do emby Premier, porém em um servidor físico. Estou com um problema no emby instalado no meu PC, todas vez que o computador reinicia ou Emby trava, os codificadores de software somem das configurações do emby e o app não funciona na tv, aparece a mensagem: erro de reprodução, contate o administrador. Para voltar ao normal preciso desinstalar e instalar o emby no PC e os codificadores voltam nas configurações e na tv roda normal, porém sempre volta a acontecer novamente. Teria alguma solução para que os codificadores permaneçam nas configurações? Ressaltando que desativei a opção de reinicialização automática do PC, mas o emby sempre trava e os codificadores somem

do you have a ETA ?

But it would still be a cool feature to experiment, maybe hidden by default but available in an expert mode on the client just like in Kodi, so normal users don't risk getting more bugs by accident while some features could be tested by others.

Thanks for the kind words... I appreciate them. I have found that many in this forum are very responsive. I have no doubt that the developers work very hard to make improvements and fix bugs. It's not my intention to simply complain, and I'm sure they know that. I can't code, so my limits are to report bugs and offer feedback, so that's what I do when I can. And @MediaIntelNUCIf you want to see the absolute absurd level of my ADD, here is a post outlining the reason I run two Emby servers, with one of them being completely interactive. The content changes automatically, depending on many factors. As a result of this setup, I create many of these issues myself, but it gives me the opportunity to see the issues many people only run into once they have a bigger problem. So one of those two servers, which I share, has content which changes programmatically. Around Christmas, the Christmas shows appear... and many other things. But to tie this back in to the original topic, here is an example of the problem the metadata issue creates... I currently have customized the artwork for several hundred music tracks. That means I pick a song, search online for a high-quality image of the single (maybe a 45 RPM single from back in the day), edit it to make sure it's square, and upload it to Emby as the image for the track. Because it doesn't save as "Song Name.jpg", I have to add it to the track on each individual server for it to be consistent. Same for adding the genres to an individual song. I have to do everything two times, identically. Most people won't realize their custom images are gone until they need to restore to a new computer, and the file paths aren't the same. If the path to the shares in the new setup aren't identical, the Emby backup won't bring back the custom artwork or genres (and other things). At least that's my understanding from what I've read. I've never experienced that myself thankfully. This single proposed change to music would fix all that grief. Some people use multiple servers (Jellyfin, Plex, etc...) in conjunction with Emby, and this should help there also. There is probably a huge amount of time people in the forums have to spend to help troubleshoot weird issues like this. At least IMO, the time implementing this would save all that time going forward, which would be better spent on other things. Thanks again for the support.

Changing the font for everyone would be kind of easy for Emby devs I guess, but allowing everyone to select any font would probably create too many bugs and would take too much effort to maintain, subtitles are kind of messy even if they look simple, one time I had to reinstall my plex server entirely because a subtitle bug broke it and I could not play anything anymore. I believe that's why most servers like Emby and Plex keeps some subtitles options limited for simplicity. But it's surely possible, I have read Kodi hides it by default, but allows it once you switch to expert mode, but it would not make a difference for image subtitles and some subtitles formats which can't be changed.

I think I got the reply to my own question, I checked this post from FrostByte and it was fixed for him in the new 3.5.34 update. It's just not available yet on my tablet(also on Nvidia Shield as another user reported), but it's released on my phone, guess I will have to wait a few days for the update to be officially released on the store for all devices, but you can still install it externally.

I should add that in step 3, a library scan has most likely occurred while the metadata share was unmounted.

Lol after reading this thread, I created a disposable account to reply quickly for the same issue. Just realized why the Frost username came to my mind at first, it was from your username but I didn't notice it at first. Now I feel like a copycat.

Hello, Is it actually or is there a new update coming soon ? Because I am using the latest version of Emby for Android (3.5.32, last updated 12 April 2026), and it's not the Android TV one, but I still see rectangles instead of music notes / special characters, so it's not fixed for me I wonder why. I feel like this is a recurring issue, I have seen old posts who have seen it fixed after an update, so maybe new updates broke the subtitles again, or else it's just a different character / encoding each time so even if it's just a music note character it could be different for everyone. To fix it, do you add support for each special character once it's reported, or do you change the encoding or font or something like that ? Just right now, after typing this, I went to check if maybe the tablet version was missing an update compared to the phone version, and I realized the android tablet latest version is 3.5.32 from April compared to the android phone version which is 3.5.34 from May. Maybe that's why it's not fixed for me because the update is not released on tablet yet, or maybe the tablet / phone versions are not supposed to have the same updates. Thanks.

Hello, I found a bug. The bug is that Emby shows no art on all media entries that existed when the metadata directory was unmounted or otherwise made unavailable to Emby (e.g. permissions). It appears that this bug has been around for a long time because I found mention of this behavior from many years ago. It is explained below. Steps to reproduce: Create a server and store your metadata on a separate network share from your media collection. Scan your library, populating the media entries with artwork. Unmount your metadata share or otherwise make it unavailable. I'm not sure how long the metadata has to be down for this to be reproduced. For me the metadata share was down for a day or two. Use an Emby client to browse the library. The media entries are in the library but no artwork is shown as expected. Remount your metadata share. Add new media to your library. Observe the following: The new media works just fine, artwork is shown as expected. The media that was in the library at the time of being unmounted will never be shown with artwork again. I say never but it has been about 2 months with nearly daily use. This is resolved by choosing to refresh the metadata for a media entry and choosing to redownload all artwork. After doing this, that media will now show artwork. For many of us it is not reasonable to redownload all artwork for all affected media. Expected behavior: Media that is tagged as its artwork no longer available should have its artwork redownloaded at the next library scan. Logs are attached in case they're useful. If there is a command somewhere to mass redownload artwork I would love to know about it. emby no art after metadata was unmounted.zip

Port 80 is also blocked in my local environment, but I do have the redirect set up externally so I did forget server and tried to connect with only the domain name and I saw no hit on port 80, it appears it automatically tried 443. I know I was looking at the right log to capture the port 80 attempt because I did a curl on it and saw the 301 response for the redirect. I tried again with http:// and the domain name, still no port, and it still seems like it automatically tried 443. I even tried the domain with port 80 and I don't see it hitting. It shouldn't remember anything if I've forgotten the server. Not really sure what to say about that.

Thank you very much for this!. I had to tweak it like crazy to make it look nice for me, but that's the fun in it. It's playing a video that's why it looks a bit blurry, I guess it was YouTube doing its things.

Hi, I'd like to take a stab at this, it's not intended in any way other than a friendly explanation, no ill will indented at all. I know this has been going for a long time and waiting for features is frustrating. I'm not part of the Emby team but I'd like to shed a little light on this, having some firsthand experience. Since I'm not part of the team, I don't know how big the Emby team is, and I'm making some assumptions based on my experience. I don't think the team is that big, I would be surprised if it's over 10 full time developers, I wouldn't be surprised to learn it's 1. In general software is incredibly difficult to develop even things that seem simple can often be much more complex under the surface. On top of that, project management is hard and predicting the future is impossible for humans (which doesn't stop us from trying). There are also dependencies and tradeoffs that are outside of the development team's control which add time and complexity to even the simplest projects. It is not abnormal for features such as this to be added and/or dropped in the middle of release cycles, sometimes multiple times. Software teams are generally opaque for these reasons; this is not something unique to Emby. One example of this is Apple who is famously mum about their development plans and commits to almost nothing. In my experience any commitment to software timelines and feature sets don't come from the development team, they come from marketing. For Emby specifically the surface area that I can see is incredibly complex, think of it as a multiplication problem where every server version, client version and app store adds features work that must be done. Then there is this feature itself, without knowing full details, I would guess would be at least a medium level of complexity to implement. This is not in an excuse, just sort of a small peek behind the curtain if you will. Hope it all makes sense. -HS PS sorry for the typos I'm sure I missed some and I didn't use an LLM to correct this.

Also can't figure any rhyme or reason which titles are not showing up. It's some old ones, some new ones. It does seem to be more of an issue earlier alphabetically, but there are random broken images all through the entire library. It also seems to have affected movies much more than TV shows.

Pixel 7a. It shows the image in the "edit images" popup. And if I re-search and add a new image on either desktop or my phone, it fixes for that particular title. It's almost like a corrupt local cache on my device? The Poster image in "edit images" and the actual Poster image, is that the same file?

We would only show that automatically if you set the option in Emby to always show the "default" sub track. Most people don't want that because most items have one of the tracks marked as default.

@LukeThe Roku should handle this with the update but we should probably still look into why these guys are getting 500s on the prefix call. The other apps may just be swallowing this error.

Apologize for the disruption. It should be fixed for you by Tue morning.

maybe they have some special casing for 80->443 redirect, idk. it interacts very weirdly with all of this

What I get from Android app and no forwarding configured: - domain name alone, no port: only attempts to connect on port 80. - http://domain, no port: only attempts on port 80. - https://domain, no port: only attempts on port 443. If I include the correct port number then it doesn't care if I add http://, https:// or use plain hostname. It still connects fine. The info is from my firewall logs because I don't have anything listening on 80 or 443 on the WAN side. Those connections fail (DROP) and while it tries multiple times for each it doesn't change the destination port.

I think this is mixing up what’s possible with what’s guaranteed. With FFmpeg + VideoToolbox, you absolutely can keep decode → scale → tone map → encode fully on the GPU. And yeah, Plex and Jellyfin have clearly done the work (custom filters, Metal kernels, tightly controlled graphs) to make that happen on Apple silicon. But that doesn’t mean you get a GPU-only pipeline just because the FFmpeg build supports it. The real deciding factor is the filter graph, not the build flags. As soon as you introduce a filter that doesn’t have a VideoToolbox/Metal path, FFmpeg will quietly insert a hwdownload/hwupload and you’re back on the CPU. That includes pretty normal things like certain subtitle paths, overlays, or some tone mapping cases depending on format. The example command works because it’s very constrained: hwupload keeps frames on the GPU scale_videotoolbox is GPU-native p010le plays nicely with the rest of the pipeline Change any of that and it’s no longer guaranteed to stay on-GPU. Also, Plex/Jellyfin showing this works doesn’t generalize to every server. Emby falls back more often—not because VideoToolbox “forces bouncing,” but because: Different FFmpeg build/flags Less complete VT/Metal mapping in the filter layer Less aggressive hardware-aware graph construction So I’d frame it like this: VideoToolbox doesn’t inherently force GPU↔CPU bouncing Avoiding it requires intentional graph design + compatible filters + server-side integration It’s not something you get “for free” from the FFmpeg build That’s also where the difference vs Intel Quick Sync Video shows up—QSV tends to be more predictable in generic FFmpeg usage, while VT can be just as efficient but is more sensitive to how the pipeline is put together.

in my testing depending on protocols, specified ports and domains I got all of those behaviors when using http redirects: * http/https protocol error * generic connection error after timeout * see user list, when click on any user get something along the lines of "access key expired" * fully works besides the library scan button and maybe some others, which fail with some analog if 404 (that one when redirecting from one https domain to another) also, I'm pretty sure that http in server list is just a harmless visual bug and the app actually tries 443 before 80, because http->https redirect is the one that I never made work no matter what. All tested on the same android app

Just, Make a lower bitrate copy, perhpas one size down in resolution or more compression h.264 or h.265 encoding and let your user pick that copy to play. There will be a drop down Video choice list on the media page. Each video will be listed as a name that comes after the first '-' in the file names.