Looking to switch from WMC/WMP

[RAP58 1]

As mentioned above - I now have an external drive with 26 movies on it, created a new Test library and pointed it to the root of the drive...  These movies were a direct copy of my main array and it includes the video file and all the various images and XML/NFO metadata. 

On my remote machine with Emby Theatre, all the images are still square as before; and only show 10 in a screen. 

Which is the particular setting in the library that will let Emby create its own metadata?  It seems that the default setting should do this automatically, but given that I got the same results, now I'm not so sure.

Please advise...

Edited November 9, 2021 by RAP58
typo

[Luke 37089]

10 minutes ago, RAP58 said:

As mentioned above - I now have an external drive with 26 movies on it, created a new Test library and pointed it to the root of the drive...  These movies were a direct copy of my main array and it includes the video file and all the various images and XML/NFO metadata. 

On my remote machine with Emby Theatre, all the images are still square as before; and only show 10 in a screen. 

Which is the particular setting in the library that will let Emby create its own metadata?  It seems that the default setting should do this automatically, but given that I got the same results, now I'm not so sure.

Please advise...

It is currently expected behavior as the aspect ratio is closer to square (1:1) then it is portrait (2:3).

[ebr 14917]

If you kept all the previous metadata and images in your test folders then you weren't testing anything.  You just duplicated the previous setup.  If you want to test our metadata (or image) retrieval, then you need to remove those from those test folders.

[RAP58 1]

@ebr:  Well then... "not necessarily" was a bit of a stretch.  I have to actually DELETE all the metadata before hand.  That's as destructive as it gets.  

Happy to do it for this test - not so happy to do it to my 5000 movie library.  I am still some distance away, before committing to Emby; and as I've mentioned earlier, I'm not willing to "break" my current system which works fine and is in use.

One step at a time... I will advise after deleting all but the movie file.

[RAP58 1]

Well, that did not work out.  The aspect ratio indeed changed from a square to a portrait rectangle - so instead of 10, I still only see 12 movies per window/screen.  This on a 3840x2160 display. I should mention again that this is on a remote machine using Emby Theatre in demo mode.

Just as disappointing, Emby could only find one proper Blu-ray cover for all those items.  (75% are Blu-Ray releases.)  It could not even find one for Edge of Tomorrow.  Note that Edge of Tomorrow has a 2D and 3D file - currently in separate folders.  If they were in the *same* folder, would it be smart enough to provide a single title entity and provide media links for either?  If not can I manually enter them?  I tried to edit the metadata for this item and the path is hard-wired.  How do you deal with 2D and 3D versions, or Directors cuts, etc?

In a similar fashion: extras: same or different approach?  Can I add them manually?

Frankly, for this small sample, my metadata is better - and the huge format of the rectangles still only allows me to see a small amount of titles. I'm beginning to think these are separate issues.  If there is some setting that might cause this, please let me know... this is really delaying my full review of the system.  

Here are the full screen, screenshots (less the locked taskbar at the bottom of my Windows 10 machine.)  I scaled them down to 25% of original size in Photoshop:

Edited November 9, 2021 by RAP58
error

[arrbee99 1560]

...don't knock it too much - I just tried Theater on a 3440x1440 screen and I get one row with 6 items...OK, I'm exaggerating, maybe 1.3 rows.

Would have thought it'd pick up Edge of Tomorrow though. Might it help to post a screenshot, if possible, unless you have already, of your exact naming of your test directory from file explorer (if you can do that with that UNC thing you use).

Also, might it help to try being more selective with deleting metadara - maybe keep everything except your main poster image.

[Luke 37089]

16 minutes ago, RAP58 said:

Well, that did not work out.  The aspect ratio indeed changed from a square to a portrait rectangle - so instead of 10, I still only see 12 movies per window/screen.  This on a 3840x2160 display. I should mention again that this is on a remote machine using Emby Theatre in demo mode.

Just as disappointing, Emby could only find one proper Blu-ray cover for all those items.  (75% are Blu-Ray releases.)  It could not even find one for Edge of Tomorrow.  Note that Edge of Tomorrow has a 2D and 3D file - currently in separate folders.  If they were in the *same* folder, would it be smart enough to provide a single title entity and provide media links for either?  If not can I manually enter them?  I tried to edit the metadata for this item and the path is hard-wired.  How do you deal with 2D and 3D versions, or Directors cuts, etc?

In a similar fashion: extras: same or different approach?  Can I add them manually?

Frankly, for this small sample, my metadata is better - and the huge format of the rectangles still only allows me to see a small amount of titles. I'm beginning to think these are separate issues.  If there is some setting that might cause this, please let me know... this is really delaying my full review of the system.  

Here are the full screen, screenshots (less the locked taskbar at the bottom of my Windows 10 machine.)  I scaled them down to 25% of original size in Photoshop:

You're running the app in TV display mode, which is designed for 10ft usage with a remote control. If this is intended for desktop usage, try going into the app's display settings, changing the display mode to Desktop, and then restarting the app.

[ebr 14917]

25 minutes ago, RAP58 said:

Well, that did not work out.  The aspect ratio indeed changed from a square to a portrait rectangle - so instead of 10, I still only see 12 movies per window/screen.  This on a 3840x2160 display. I should mention again that this is on a remote machine using Emby Theatre in demo mode.

Just as disappointing, Emby could only find one proper Blu-ray cover for all those items.  (75% are Blu-Ray releases.)  It could not even find one for Edge of Tomorrow.  Note that Edge of Tomorrow has a 2D and 3D file - currently in separate folders.  If they were in the *same* folder, would it be smart enough to provide a single title entity and provide media links for either?  If not can I manually enter them?  I tried to edit the metadata for this item and the path is hard-wired.  How do you deal with 2D and 3D versions, or Directors cuts, etc?

In a similar fashion: extras: same or different approach?  Can I add them manually?

Frankly, for this small sample, my metadata is better - and the huge format of the rectangles still only allows me to see a small amount of titles. I'm beginning to think these are separate issues.  If there is some setting that might cause this, please let me know... this is really delaying my full review of the system.  

Here are the full screen, screenshots (less the locked taskbar at the bottom of my Windows 10 machine.)  I scaled them down to 25% of original size in Photoshop:

It looks like you chose a set of items that are simply not likely to be well known by the metadata providers such as tmdb.  It also could be that you didn't enable the metadata providers properly but hard to say for sure.

A default installation without having changed anything should be able to identify and gather metadata for 95%+ of common items but jazz artist concert DVDs aren't necessarily all that common...  I did a quick search of tmd for "Etta James Live" and only found one item - a concert from 1993.  Not sure if that is one of the ones you have there.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/134849-etta-james-live-at-montreux-1993

[arrbee99 1560]

Desktop Mode is, how can I put this politely, ugly.

[Luke 37089]

Just now, arrbee99 said:

Desktop Mode is, how can I put this politely, ugly.

It's the same as your built in web app, so please feel free to create feature request topics to make it look how you would like it to look.

[arrbee99 1560]

2 minutes ago, Luke said:

It's the same as your built in web app, so please feel free to create feature request topics to make it look how you would like it to look.

The main one I guess would be to make css available in Theater and others. And/or have the horizontal home screen available in desktop mode. And options to get rid of posters on detail screens...I'll see if there's feature requests for any of those already.

[arrbee99 1560]

But in the meantime, maybe scaling could be a bit better. The top right controls (minimise / full screen etc) are tiny and when I go to full screen the posters get significantly bigger whereas it would be nice if it just displayed more of them.

[ebr 14917]

2 minutes ago, arrbee99 said:

and when I go to full screen the posters get significantly bigger whereas it would be nice if it just displayed more of them.

That would not be proper behavior on a TV interface as they are always full screen and viewed from a distance.  IOW - it doesn't make a lot of sense to run in TV display mode on anything other than a TV (or full-screen monitor used as such).

[RAP58 1]

43 minutes ago, arrbee99 said:

Might it help to post a screenshot, if possible, unless you have already, of your exact naming of your test directory from file explorer

[RAP58 1]

42 minutes ago, Luke said:

You're running the app in TV display mode, which is designed for 10ft usage with a remote control. If this is intended for desktop usage, try going into the app's display settings, changing the display mode to Desktop, and then restarting the app.

OK... given that I have  large 4K TV's connected to 3 HTPC's plus an NVidea ShieldTV, I think when I test I will change this everywhere.  That display is more for the 20ft. usage.

Thank-you sir!  THAT was the cause of the issue on a small number of titles!

[RAP58 1]

38 minutes ago, ebr said:

It looks like you chose a set of items that are simply not likely to be well known by the metadata providers such as tmdb.  It also could be that you didn't enable the metadata providers properly but hard to say for sure.

I chose a cross section.  There were two TV productions. I'm not concered about those; as long as I can add my own metadata.

I did a search for Etta James Live Blu-Ray and come up with a a few pages of hits to the exact concert I have:  Blu-ray.com, Amazon, Ebay, Discogs, Blu-ray High Def Digest, etc.

My Movies, found it but with just the front cover and basic metadata.

What about Edge of Tomorrow? 

[arrbee99 1560]

18 minutes ago, ebr said:

That would not be proper behavior on a TV interface as they are always full screen and viewed from a distance.  IOW - it doesn't make a lot of sense to run in TV display mode on anything other than a TV (or full-screen monitor used as such).

I guess it just depends on what people like. I like the old horizontal home screen so I' get huge posters everywhere. In desktop mode I get a not nice home screen which doesn't really look like my web app cause I can add css to that.

But things still don't scale nicely. In desktop mode, as I say, the posters get bigger full screen, which might be OK as they're still a reasonable size, even though I think it would just show more of them, but that alpha picker stays tiny. In TV mode, but not on a TV, the posters are like this on full screen -

 

[arrbee99 1560]

2 minutes ago, RAP58 said:

I chose a cross section.  There were two TV productions. I'm not concered about those; as long as I can add my own metadata.

I did a search for Etta James Live Blu-Ray and come up with a a few pages of hits to the exact concert I have:  Blu-ray.com, Amazon, Ebay, Discogs, Blu-ray High Def Digest, etc.

My Movies, found it but with just the front cover and basic metadata.

What about Edge of Tomorrow? 

Did the search you did for Etta James show up in any metadata provider that Emby actually uses ? I doubt there'd me much in The MovieDB or The Open Movie Database.

Edge of Tomorrow is named the same for me and it shows up fine. I guess your Emby metadata providers are ticked (which I presume is the default anyway). Did you run a library scan ?

[RAP58 1]

25 minutes ago, ebr said:

That would not be proper behavior on a TV interface as they are always full screen and viewed from a distance.  IOW - it doesn't make a lot of sense to run in TV display mode on anything other than a TV (or full-screen monitor used as such).

I would never run Emby in TV Mode and have a total of 10-12 titles to view per screen,  I've been running My Movies in WMC for 10 years and with a 65" 1080p Plasma it looks wonderful with 3 rows of 9 covers.  27.  Who thought 10-12 titles would be good?  This is in my Home Theatre that is  a10ft. room.

My Living Room is a 55" 4K HDR display -and it looks even better there.

In any case - folks have different environments, different sized TV's....and young as well as old eyes.  I think a "one size fits all" approach is simplistic... IMHO.

 

[RAP58 1]

12 minutes ago, arrbee99 said:

Did the search you did for Etta James show up in any metadata provider that Emby actually uses ?

No I didn't;  I just did a web search out of curiosity.

13 minutes ago, arrbee99 said:

Did you run a library scan ?

Yes - twice.

[arrbee99 1560]

You probably won't be surprised to hear I don't know then.

Maybe while your experimenting you could try a few more test folders but separate ones for movies and music videos, and using appropriate Emby library types, Library type Movies for Movies, and well, you know the rest...

[RAP58 1]

Thanks Arrbee99 - I guess what I'm struggling with, is how a Blu-Ray music concert is any different then a Blu-Ray movie release; except perhaps that they are not as commercially popular.  The formats - video and audio are exactly the same.  Is your approach to keep the movie/music libraries separate, so that the more available and correct metadata provides a cleaner and homogenous aesthetic while browsing?  Just curious...

Unfortunately, my array has all of these formats mixed.  For years, My Movies made that physical storage completely irrelevant.  With esoteric jazz stuff, its easy to add a title and create my own metadata.  If I go to Emby Server in my Movies library, I don't even see a way of initiating this manually.  Does it only do it via scanning folders?

[arrbee99 1560]

2 minutes ago, RAP58 said:

Thanks Arrbee99 - I guess what I'm struggling with, is how a Blu-Ray music concert is any different then a Blu-Ray movie release; except perhaps that they are not as commercially popular.  The formats - video and audio are exactly the same.  Is your approach to keep the movie/music libraries separate, so that the more available and correct metadata provides a cleaner and homogenous aesthetic while browsing?  Just curious...

Unfortunately, my array has all of these formats mixed.  For years, My Movies made that physical storage completely irrelevant.  With esoteric jazz stuff, its easy to add a title and create my own metadata.  If I go to Emby Server in my Movies library, I don't even see a way of initiating this manually.  Does it only do it via scanning folders?

Well...I guess they are essentially the same, but I personally would have them separate, just as I have documentaries separate (basically the same I just treat them differently). Its similar (to me anyway) to a bit of an argument that was raging round here about movies and TV series (too me they're both just stories, just broken up into separate parts when it comes to series - I'll conveniently ignore anthologies...), besides the default views and metadata providers for movies and music videos are different and things should (repeat should) look better and be more successful metadata wise.

I get the organisation bit though, if it ain't broke etc. On the other hand, you've tried Kodi (I think), Plex and now your here, so presumably you're making a decent attempt to move on.

Emby just likes its stuff in silos a bit more. Emby should find metadata pretty well , except for the more unusual stuff (you might have heard this before), but you can add metadata manually in Emby. For example, for unidentified items you can try searching for that title in Emby and pick from what it finds, or if you have a imdb number you can type that in and hopefully that'll add correct metadata. For jazz videos you can add pictures and descriptions manually (somewhat laborious obviously). So you can right click on an item and test out Edit Metadata, Edit Images, Identify, Refresh Metadata.

Try to stick with it, and if you decide to do it, it sounds like a big job, but you only have to do it once.

[FrostByte 5051]

22 minutes ago, RAP58 said:

Thanks Arrbee99 - I guess what I'm struggling with, is how a Blu-Ray music concert is any different then a Blu-Ray movie release; except perhaps that they are not as commercially popular.  The formats - video and audio are exactly the same.  Is your approach to keep the movie/music libraries separate, so that the more available and correct metadata provides a cleaner and homogenous aesthetic while browsing?  Just curious...

Unfortunately, my array has all of these formats mixed.  For years, My Movies made that physical storage completely irrelevant.  With esoteric jazz stuff, its easy to add a title and create my own metadata.  If I go to Emby Server in my Movies library, I don't even see a way of initiating this manually.  Does it only do it via scanning folders?

I only have a few Blu-ray music CDs.  For Abbey Road I converted it to individual MKA files for the TrueHD 7.1 Atmos tracks so that I wouldn't lose Atmos.  For others I usually convert the DTS-HD tracks to individual FLAC files.  The Android app supports gapless playback so concerts still sound fluid, but you could convert concerts to one big MKA or FLAC file too I suppose and then still add them to a music library.

With them in my music library I get all the metadata and can add them to music playlists, etc 

[RAP58 1]

3 minutes ago, arrbee99 said:

So you can right click on an item and test out Edit Metadata, Edit Images, Identify, Refresh Metadata.

Yes - I can see how to do that.  But with creating a new title - I guess I have to create a folder in that is scanned in a library, add the audio or video file - wait for Emby to scan it - then edit the metadata when it can't find the title?

With My Movies, they do have auto-scanning; but it was unreliable. So I always did a search and then just added the correct title.