Looking to switch from WMC/WMP

[RAP58 1]

I do not collect music short-form videos - but I do collect Live Concerts.  Of live music video recordings I would say I have:

1. 65% Blu-ray
2. 20% DVD
3. 15% Video files from festivals - typically OTA/DTV recording or other TV presentations. 

What would be the advantage of separating them?

From a  storage perspective, I have SnapRAID managing the array - for all of this material.  My photos, music and home videos - or other media (MIDI, stock images, etc.), are on a separate RAID 1 - since these files change more often.

From a  database perspective; I had no problems in the past.  What issues might I have?

Edited November 8, 2021 by RAP58
Typo

[RAP58 1]

3 hours ago, GrimReaper said:

Edit: Easy test, make separate Movie library with only those three movies - see what you'll get then.

Easy test - OK,  Created a new TEST Library with 4 movies:

 

When I enter, it shows this:

The 4 movies are as follows:

Not sure how long it should take to scan 4 individual movie folders.  FYI I went back to my initial Movie library and search for "Bonnie and Clyde".  Found it immediately.  So why did it find it the first time - and not the second?

 

 

 

[arrbee99 1560]

TBH I was just looking at your screenshots and seeing what looked like music videos mixed in with movies and thinking if you separate them you might get your movies showing actual posters and music videos showing 1:1 images. You might get better metadata using the IMVDb (or you might not).

 I have very few music videos, and only then as individual tracks, but it seems to work.

[arrbee99 1560]

Another dumb question -  shouldn't you're Folders above stop at \\SERVER\Movies SEVEN\ and not mention individual items.

[Luke 37090]

38 minutes ago, arrbee99 said:

Another dumb question -  shouldn't you're Folders above stop at \\SERVER\Movies SEVEN\ and not mention individual items.

Yes that's a good catch. Why setup your libraries like that?

[RAP58 1]

@ arrbee99 - post 1:  What do you mean separate them?  Put them on another hard drive?  Add another folder hierarchy?  Both are not easy to do and frankly, storage structure should be independent of data structure. 

@ arrbee99 - post 2:  The test was for 3 movies.... not 700.  (Which is what I would have, if instead I used: \\SERVER\Movies SEVEN\ )

I am using UNC paths to the root of 7x 8TB movie drives that work fine with WMC and KODI (via Android ShieldTV and a new Android TV.)  I do not want to break these current paths - so I used them for Emby. 

In each movie folder (like \\SERVER\Movies SEVEN\Bonnie and Clyde), I have a number of files.  Typically the video file plus all the various metadata files that I export from My Movies.  These are used by Kodi, JRiver, Popcorn Hour and other media centers that I've been testing.  (formats are XML and NFO) The folder typically also include the front and back covers and fanart; sometimes a poster or other images - like liner notes. 

The early part of this thread started with the possibility of reading metadata exported from My Movies; and from responses, I thought this was possible. IMDB does not have a lot of esoteric jazz concerts;  After 10 years of using My Movies, I'd like to keep this metadata and was told it would likely work.  So "reinventing" the metadata is not a solution I would consider at this time.

[ebr 14917]

54 minutes ago, RAP58 said:

Easy test - OK,  Created a new TEST Library with 4 movies:

 

When I enter, it shows this:

The 4 movies are as follows:

Not sure how long it should take to scan 4 individual movie folders.  FYI I went back to my initial Movie library and search for "Bonnie and Clyde".  Found it immediately.  So why did it find it the first time - and not the second?

 

 

 

That is not going to work.  You point the library to a parent folder containing movies - not individual movie folders.

Still need the answer to my original question about the source images.  What do those (the actual image files in your file system) look like for the first few items shown in your views?  It still looks like you may have items with square covers and that is what is driving this whole mess but we need to confirm that.

Thanks.

[RAP58 1]

Just thought of something... I need to put UNC paths under "(Optional) Shared network folder:" - not the folder field?

If I delete these locations and try again (its not letting me edit the initial location)  - deleting this, is just deleting the location path... correct?

[RAP58 1]

1 minute ago, ebr said:

That is not going to work.  You point the library to a parent folder containing movies - not individual movie folders.

You mean to say,  point the library to a parent folder containing movie folders? 

Then how do I do this "easy test" for 3 or 4 movies, when the parent of the movie folders is the root of an 8TB hard drive?

3 minutes ago, ebr said:

What do those (the actual image files in your file system) look like for the first few items shown in your views? 

I did eventually respond to this - see above - about 2 hours ago:  I posted the first row after a re-sort.

[arrbee99 1560]

'@ arrbee99 - post 1:  What do you mean separate them?  Put them on another hard drive?  Add another folder hierarchy?  Both are not easy to do and frankly, storage structure should be independent of data structure.'

Just meant another folder, eg -

True, it might not be easy for you to do, and it might not help anyway, but just a suggestion.

PS I know nothing about UNC....

[RAP58 1]

@ebr: Here is the first one in that re-sorted row.  Its not square:

 

[ebr 14917]

3 minutes ago, RAP58 said:

did eventually respond to this - see above - about 2 hours ago:  I posted the first row after a re-sort.

Those were not the source images in your file system.

Please show us the actual image files.  Thanks.

[arrbee99 1560]

Again, don't know about this UNC stuff,but can you create something like F:\Emby Test Movies\ in which you put maybe copies of Cruella, Bonnie and Clyde etc (just the movie itself) and add a new Emby library pointing to that...

[pwhodges 1532]

2 hours ago, RAP58 said:

How does Emby handle extra content?  This happens from time to time for movies; but is very common with Live Concerts.  

It depends what the extras are.  You can put extras like documentaries, interviews, and suchlike, in a subdirectory called extras (!); trailers can be included alongside the film; you can have multiple versions of a film treated as one, with a selectable option for which version to watch - but you have to follow the naming rules for this to work.

I am getting the impression that you simply want Emby to behave like some other software; Emby will behave properly like Emby if it is given a chance by being allowed to scan your media and collect the necessary metadata and images - yes, it'll take a while with 5000 films, but it just gets on with it so long as the starting conditions (folder layouts and the like) are within the parameters set out in the various wiki articles about naming (yes, there is plenty of documentation that tells you what you need to know to make things work).

Paul

[RAP58 1]

@ebr: Here is the first one in that re-sorted row.  Its also not a square:

 

[ebr 14917]

1 minute ago, RAP58 said:

@ebr: Here is the first one in that re-sorted row.  Its not square:

 

Okay, that's what I was looking for.  It isn't square but it also isn't what our standard is.  I'll bet it is far enough off of standard that the UI is choosing square.  Is this a scan from a BD disc?

[RAP58 1]

1 minute ago, arrbee99 said:

Again, don't know about this UNC stuff, but can you create something like F:\Emby Test Movies\ in which you put maybe copies of Cruella, Bonnie and Clyde etc (just the movie itself) and add a new Emby library pointing to that...

F:\ is a local device; not useful in a network.  I use my server as a server; that's why I use UNC paths.  There are other ways of doing network shares, but I'm using UNC since all my current devices use them just fine.

[RAP58 1]

4 minutes ago, pwhodges said:

I am getting the impression that you simply want Emby to behave like some other software; Emby will behave properly like Emby if it is given a chance by being allowed to scan your media and collect the necessary metadata and images - yes, it'll take a while with 5000 films, but it just gets on with it so long as the starting conditions (folder layouts and the like) are within the parameters set out in the various wiki articles about naming (yes, there is plenty of documentation that tells you what you need to know to make things work).

LOL!  I do not need Emby to work like "other software" - but I do need it to be properly designed and work.  As a software developer, not having good structural design means problems down the road... spaghetti code, rebuilds, problems with deprecation and full platform pivots; I've seen it all.   I started this thread with music libraries - and suggested that folder structure is not a good approach to to creating metadata; IMHO, its never a good practice to relate storage structures with data structures - they should be seperate

So, I was assured that my Music library structure would not impeded importing it as long as metadata is there.  Perfect... seemed to work to,

Now we are saying that movies require an Emby folder structure???

I've also asked, if allowing Emby to do its own scan, destroy or modify my existing metadata.  Certainly ,My Movies can recreate it because it uses a SQL database; but I'm not thrilled to recreate all metadata for 56 TB's of movies and over 5000 titles;  without some reasonable assurances.

[arrbee99 1560]

7 minutes ago, RAP58 said:

F:\ is a local device; not useful in a network.  I use my server as a server; that's why I use UNC paths.  There are other ways of doing network shares, but I'm using UNC since all my current devices use them just fine.

I shall bow to your vastly superior knowledge of such thing. I just meant, as I think you mentioned above, to test 3 or 4 movies, you need a parent folder just containing those movies, so a network version of -

maybe could have found a better example...

[RAP58 1]

13 minutes ago, ebr said:

Okay, that's what I was looking for.  It isn't square but it also isn't what our standard is.  I'll bet it is far enough off of standard that the UI is choosing square.  Is this a scan from a BD disc?

Yes.  And scans are never accurate which is why, I cannot believe that the way your system works is to have perfectly accurate scans.  Its so easy to tilt a cover while scanning and completely skewing aspect ratios.  Others do NOT do this: IMHO, neither should Emby.

 

[pwhodges 1532]

12 minutes ago, RAP58 said:

I've seen it all.   I started this thread with music libraries - and suggested that folder structure is not a good approach to to creating metadata; IMHO, its never a good practice to relate storage structures with data structures - they should be seperate

So, I was assured that my Music library structure would not impeded importing it as long as metadata is there.  Perfect... seemed to work to,

Now we are saying that movies require an Emby folder structure???

I've also asked, if allowing Emby to do its own scan, destroy or modify my existing metadata.  Certainly ,My Movies can recreate it because it uses a SQL database; but I'm not thrilled to recreate all metadata for 56 TB's of movies and over 5000 titles;  without some reasonable assurances.

I've seen it all too (I was in computing for almost 50 years before retiring).

My experience is that for music metadata is more limiting than a folder structure, and I use folder view exclusively for music - metadata only works well if your music is (a) almost entirely of the type that is structured in "albums" (most of mine isn't), and (b) almost entirely included in the published metadata sources (about half of mine isn't - some because I recorded it, but much because there are many areas even of commercial recordings which they simply don't cover). 

I'm not knowledgeable about movie metadata, but my impression is that it is not well standardised, and that, for instance, nfo files are often not sufficiently compatible between applications to give uniformly good results.

As for reassurances - you can reassure yourself by trying a modest sample set up following Emby's requirements, as has already been suggested.

Paul

 

Edited November 8, 2021 by pwhodges

[RAP58 1]

3 hours ago, pwhodges said:

As for reassurances - you can reassure yourself by trying a modest sample set up following Emby's requirements, as has already been suggested.

And then if it works, reorganize my entire +5000 movie library, and then spend 2 days rebuilding the 10TB parity drive; to get to first base?

Fact is, no one seems to be able to tell me with any certainly, why my installation is not working as expected; so forgive me if I'm reticent to attempt a "see if it works" solution, that would take me days to complete, with and with no certainty on the outcome. 

Metadata:

Your experience with metadata is not mine.  The entire Libraries and Archives media industry is based on metadata; and it works fine.  However, as any computing science discipline, metadata is susceptible to all the pitfalls of poor design, poor implementation, bugs, etc.  And in the case of mp3's, we have the on-line masses generating most of it.  I stay away from that stuff.  Mine are 99% full album rips and recordings and metadata are correct.  (I have NO non-commercially released compilations).  This is why I was thrilled that Emby used metadata rather then folder structures like Plex.  

If movies are using folder structures then I'm disappointed.  I'd like the dev guys chime in on this, because they suggested that reading the NFO files would  probably work and they did a test with a file I supplied.

[ebr 14917]

14 hours ago, RAP58 said:

Yes.  And scans are never accurate which is why, I cannot believe that the way your system works is to have perfectly accurate scans.  Its so easy to tilt a cover while scanning and completely skewing aspect ratios.  Others do NOT do this: IMHO, neither should Emby.

 

99% of our users are not using scans of covers.  They are using available artwork from the metadata providers that we (and most other media programs save mymovies) use.  We can hopefully adjust our interface to be a little more tolerant of these non-standard (in the world of digital media) cover shapes.

10 hours ago, RAP58 said:

no one seems to be able to tell me with any certainly, why my installation is not working as expected

I just explained why your images are not showing as expected.  The only other thing I've seen that "isn't working as expected" is the small test you tried to setup and that is because of the way that test library was structured.  I don't see any point in pursuing that since it was only a test and is no longer necessary.

Emby can work with different structures but the reality of the situation is that there are some standard structures for digital libraries of movies and TV series and we try to work with those. 

Movie Naming

TV Naming

[RAP58 1]

Thank-you ebr,

That secondary short test was to see what kind of a job Emby did in creating its own metadata.  I guess I'll create a new share on an external drive, with 2 dozen movies and see how it does.  The images shared above showed easily that amount in one screen. 

If that works, then my follow-up question before I do the whole library:

Emby metadata is uniquely named so that it would not destroy the existing metadata in each of the movie folders?

 

[ebr 14917]

29 minutes ago, RAP58 said:

Emby metadata is uniquely named so that it would not destroy the existing metadata in each of the movie folders?

No, not necessarily as we use standard names to be compatible with other systems - although MyMovies does not use standard names so it may or may not conflict.

However, If we address the image shape issue, I'm not sure you really need to eliminate your metadata although that would be a sure fire way to make sure everything works.