A couple of (4) library management / metadata questions for a new user

[Hawkwinter 11]

Situation:
I've just taken the plunge and gotten Emby Premiere.

Genres:

1. The automatically detected genres are pretty messy, with a bunch of stuff that I would like to purge / exclude or combine. I saw people mentioning "Genre Cleaner" but I can't seem to find where to get it. Where can I get Genre Cleaner? it seems pretty useful, but I'm having no luck finding where to get it, and it didn't come preinstalled.
2. Is there a way to purge episode-level genres from my libraries, or to tell emby not to download them in the first place? manually setting the genres on shows is one thing, but doing it on hundreds or thousands of individual episodes is awful - even with the usermade bulk metadata tool that lets me do it per-season it's pretty slow.

Next Up

While I was adding in some "Movie Series" as a show (keeping all my MCU stuff together) with a manual tvshow.nfo file, at one point I accidentally added a show to another show at one point, without moving the related files, and without the original show disappearing. I wish I had written down how I did that - anyways... It led to me having a different idea.

3. Is there a way to get emby to detect a playlist in the folder structure for a show, or get next-up to show the next unplayed item in a playlist rather than a show? Is there a way for me to do that or something similar? Or is the below-mentioned manually-created dummy-show workaround idea my only real option to get 'next-up' functionality working on a franchise level rather than a tvshow level?
Here's what I mean / have in mind.

I have my various MCU Shows (and I'm starting to have my MCU films as shows). I would like to have a MCU Chronological "meta-show" with a season for each year. In each season would be an xml playlist file generated by emby (either a symbolic link, or I would move / copy the playlist and rename it, doesn't matter), containing all of the stuff with a release date in that year.
Ideally I would also do similar with my DC Animated Universe shows, and Buffy, Stargate, and Star Wars stuff, and some other things that are a shared 'world' with multiple shows inside. Then I (or other people in my house), could open it, see everything in order, as well as their watch status and next-up would work with it.

Alternately, if Next-Up can be set to detect it from a playlist as well rather than only individual shows, that would also be a great solution. Or something similar.

Oh! "Next up in the collection" by playdate could also work, or getting a "show" to load its season and episode data from the shows in a collection, even if it tracks the watch-data separately thats fine.

If I need to do some manual file editing that's fine too. Ultimately I'm just looking for a solution to this usecase that's easier than me making a dummy TV show with hardlinks to all the episodes, renumbering everything, and putting copied episode nfo files in the folder and then changing all the episode numbers therein manually - which is my current best idea how to do this thing.

4. If a show has a "Season 0" full of 'specials' which take place between seasons or between episodes, is there a way to get those to show up in their correct placement in 'Next Up' based on airdate or something, or would I need to use a similar workaround to what I mentioned for question 3?

Edited April 10, 2022 by Hawkwinter

[GrimReaper 3294]

Lots of grounds to cover there. 

2 hours ago, Hawkwinter said:

The automatically detected genres are pretty messy, with a bunch of stuff that I would like to purge / exclude or combine. I saw people mentioning "Genre Cleaner" but I can't seem to find where to get it. Where can I get Genre Cleaner? it seems pretty useful, but I'm having no luck finding where to get it, and it didn't come preinstalled.

You can find Genre Cleaner in Plugin Catalogue. 

2 hours ago, Hawkwinter said:

Is there a way to purge episode-level genres from my libraries, or to tell emby not to download them in the first place? manually setting the genres on shows is one thing, but doing it on hundreds or thousands of individual episodes is awful - even with the usermade bulk metadata tool that lets me do it per-season it's pretty slow.

Not quite sure what do you mean by that, AFAIK episode genres are not scraped at all, they are inherited from Series/Season level, are tracked internally and are not exposed in the UI unless you manually assign it, and they are not returned on search nor listed under Genres tab in any library, so not quite understanding what do you mean by "removing it on individual episodes"?

2 hours ago, Hawkwinter said:

Is there a way to get emby to detect a playlist in the folder structure for a show, or get next-up to show the next unplayed item in a playlist rather than a show?

Nope. Lend your support to one of the open FRs:

 

2 hours ago, Hawkwinter said:

If a show has a "Season 0" full of 'specials' which take place between seasons or between episodes, is there a way to get those to show up in their correct placement in 'Next Up' based on airdate or something,

Or something. Each Special episode Edit Metadata dialog has "Special Episode Info" section, with "Airs during season" and "Airs before episode" fields, which enables you to place that special episode exactly between the two regular episodes or season start/end as you desire; sometimes that metadata is scraped from provider, if available, sometimes there is none, but you can always manually append/insert it. 

Edited April 10, 2022 by GrimReaper

[Hawkwinter 11]

16 minutes ago, GrimReaper said:

Plugin Catalogue. 

Oh Hey! Nice! I didn't realize that existed. I was looking for somewhere to download them manually on the website like I did for the smart playlist plugin. I will be digging through the catalog now that I know it exists. Thanks!

17 minutes ago, GrimReaper said:

AFAIK episode genres are not scraped at all, they are inherited from Series/Season level, are tracked internally and are not exposed in the UI unless you manually assign it, and they are not returned on search nor listed under Genres tab in any library, so not quite understanding what do you mean by "removing it on individual episodes"?

For some of my shows that's true, but for others (Jackie Chan Adventures, Gargoyles) it seems to have scraped them from somewhere - or at least scraped them at the show level and then baked them into the episode NFOs, making me delete them from each episode. I didn't already have NFOs from somewhere else, I'm migrating from plex and did not have any sort of NFO Export plugin or the like, so this migrating process is involving redoing all of my metadata as I do it. I don't know why some of the episodes have genres and others don't.

28 minutes ago, GrimReaper said:

Each Special episode Edit Metadata dialog has "Special Episode Info" section, with "Airs during season" and "Airs before episode" fields, which enables you to place that special episode exactly between the two regular episodes or season start/end as you desire; sometimes that metadata is scraped from provider, if available, sometimes there is none, but you can always manually append/insert it.

That'll Do. I can work with that. Thanks for pointing out where I need to look.

29 minutes ago, GrimReaper said:

Lend your support to one of the open FRs:

Unfortunate. And Done. Good to Know. I thought it might be a thing with no corresponding UI feature, that I might be able to get around by setting up my files a particular way (like copying a playlist file into a season folder, or something similar). As mentioned I got the idea when I accidentally made one marvel trilogy dummy show show up as episodes inside another marvel trilogy dummy show.

I guess I'll end up using some mishmash of dummy shows like I'm doing for movie series and smart playlists as a workaround in the meantime. I can turn a smart playlist into something like a 'Next-Up' with some clever set up of filters, but then it does everything based on the "played" status of a specific user, and doesn't update right away, and it's a bit buggy. A single giant sprawling MCU dummy show with everything in it would be impractically large to manage, so for that I think I will have to use something with smart playlists as a workaround, but a combined dummy show could work for something like Buffy and Angel or Stargate where it's only a couple shows that go back and forth by airdate - a bit annoying to set up, but not as crazy as for something like the DCAU or MCU.

Thanks.