Top Picks support thread

[horstepipe 356]

Taking another look at the logs and at the browsers dev console, it is definitely a timeout error.

In nginx logs I'm seeing a 499 code, in browsers dev console I'm seeing a 524 code (this code comes from cloudflare if a request takes longer than 100 seconds).

It is working by bypassing cloudflare and nginx, not sure why it wasn't working before.

Any chance pulling the movie list in smaller chunks so it also works with cloudflare in place?

 

Edited November 29, 2022 by horstepipe

[chef 3745]

2 hours ago, Bottles51 said:

@chef I'm trying to better understand how top picks is pulling art when using thumb images. It seems as it is not using the thumb I have stored with movie and is using a backdrop with the logo overlaid. So when I have no logo it generates a poster with no logo and no top pick number. Also if this is not the case and top picks is pulling new art, why not pull from existing? I spend the time to add all thumbs that are missing. Not so much time on logo.sting art? A lot of movies do not have thumb images to be pulled and i take the time to add them.

embyserver.txt 2.39 MB · 1 download

the thumb images are custom generated during the the update task.

I'll check the log, however a logo, and backdrop needs to be available either in the item folder, or from the providers (TMDB, TVDB, etc.)  in order to get best results.

 

[chef 3745]

2 hours ago, horstepipe said:

Taking another look at the logs and at the browsers dev console, it is definitely a timeout error.

In nginx logs I'm seeing a 499 code, in browsers dev console I'm seeing a 524 code (this code comes from cloudflare if a request takes longer than 100 seconds).

It is working by bypassing cloudflare and nginx, not sure why it wasn't working before.

Any chance pulling the movie list in smaller chunks so it also works with cloudflare in place?

 

do you mean when we create the library?

[akacharos 11]

Feature suggestion: Currently any content (movie,tv show etc) that gets to "Top Picks" selections is getting tagged with "top-pick" & "top-pick-x" tags.
Once the content is no longer on Top Picks, the tag is removed. How about upon removal another tag is added (eg. top-pick-featured") so that a history of content (what was once part of Top Picks) is maintained. There are many useful things you can do with that tag, like generate collections/playlists with Smart Playlists based on this tagged content.
Just planting seeds 

Edited November 29, 2022 by akacharos

[GrimReaper 3291]

2 minutes ago, akacharos said:

Feature suggestion: Currently any content (movie,tv show etc) that gets to "Top Picks" selections is getting tagged with "top-pick" & "top-pick-x" tags.
Once the content is no longer on Top Picks, the tag is removed. How about upon removal another tag is added (eg. top-pick-featured") so that a history of content (what was once part of Top Picks) is maintained. There are many useful things you can do from that like generate collections/playlists with Smart Playlists with this tagged content.
Just planting seeds 

Sorry, disagreeing with this, don't want any residual tags once Top Picks has done its thing for current timeline (week/month/whatever).

[akacharos 11]

why would you consider such tag "residual" ? Tags are for assigning information to data.
I find generic metadata tags added from scrappers more "residual" than anything else. What's the point of having tags in Emby in the first place?

[GrimReaper 3291]

12 minutes ago, akacharos said:

What's the point of having tags in Emby in the first place?

I have 100,000+ tags on my content (scraping TMDB and IMDB keywords as tags with external tool). What my user adore as its primary appeal is "term searching" (think 'submarine warfare' or 'vampires') as opposed to "title searching". I use it for access control also. As well as playlists creation. 

Edited November 29, 2022 by GrimReaper
Clarification

[akacharos 11]

obviously, we have totally different opinions   because what I consider noise, is appealing to you (screenshot).
which is fine, I just find it fascinating how different perspective people have on things.
Though still I don't get how this single tag (100000 + 1!)  will change you user's term searching.

[akacharos 11]

In any case, if it gets considered as a feature by chef, this can be an optional feature in the settings, and everyone is happy !

[Happy2Play 8281]

@akacharos But technically every movie should be in Top-Pick depending on your setting from the time you installed the plug as new/recently added items shall be featured.  But yes there is the limitation of 9 items so some could be overlooked depending on how often you run Top-Picks.

[woenk 57]

On 27/11/2022 at 05:20, woenk said:

Its on page 17 including the logfile

....did some testing and it looks like the each episode in each season duplication thingy is again connected to my structure. With dedicated season folders in the series folder it works fine, without it seems to not know which season the episodes belong to.

[akacharos 11]

22 hours ago, Happy2Play said:

@akacharos But technically every movie should be in Top-Pick depending on your setting from the time you installed the plug as new/recently added items shall be featured.  But yes there is the limitation of 9 items so some could be overlooked depending on how often you run Top-Picks.

I assume it depends on how often you add content, how often you re-generate Top Picks , whether you favor recent items and whether you curate content (hand pick any items or let it auto populate the top list). 

Just to get my take on this: There is no one-size-fits-all usage and Top Picks for me was a promising start for some curated content in Emby (default suggestions are awfully unusable). 9 items is better than none.  I manually create collections as a way of curating content. Before it was a more collaborate and social thing -until Emby developers decided to change collection permissions by patching one hole and opening another one.

When you got thousands of movies and tv-shows, you don't want users to scroll endlessly without any guidance or some smart suggestion algorithm. One of the reasons why most of my friends (my actual emby users) still keep their subscriptions on Netflix,Amazon Mubi etc, it's because they get a lot of suggestions or curated content. They only watch on my server when they know what they want to see and is not available in such platforms or check the latest Emby server additions or because they browse these curated collections I manually make. 

So Emby seriously lacks on suggestions, there is no social interaction between users (to be fair, any solution -not just Emby) and the Emby recommendations are no good at all. I mean check Netflix landing page and check default Emby. User engagement is on a totally different level. 
That's why to me it seemed a good idea to maintain and grow a set of items that was once signaled as suggested/curated. Apparently not everyone has the same mindset and I respect that. It is what it is. 

Not trying to prove a point or bitch about anything. Just trying to give my perspective on things. 

[chef 3745]

12 hours ago, woenk said:

....did some testing and it looks like the each episode in each season duplication thingy is again connected to my structure. With dedicated season folders in the series folder it works fine, without it seems to not know which season the episodes belong to.

Oh.  I'll have to review the code, but now that you mention it, I can see how this might happen.

I'll review and be in touch. 

[chef 3745]

1 hour ago, akacharos said:

I assume it depends on how often you add content, how often you re-generate Top Picks , whether you favor recent items and whether you curate content (hand pick any items or let it auto populate the top list). 

Just to get my take on this: There is no one-size-fits-all usage and Top Picks for me was a promising start for some curated content in Emby (default suggestions are awfully unusable). 9 items is better than none.  I manually create collections as a way of curating content. Before it was a more collaborate and social thing -until Emby developers decided to change collection permissions by patching one hole and opening another one.

When you got thousands of movies and tv-shows, you don't want users to scroll endlessly without any guidance or some smart suggestion algorithm. One of the reasons why most of my friends (my actual emby users) still keep their subscriptions on Netflix,Amazon Mubi etc, it's because they get a lot of suggestions or curated content. They only watch on my server when they know what they want to see and is not available in such platforms or check the latest Emby server additions or because they browse these curated collections I manually make. 

So Emby seriously lacks on suggestions, there is no social interaction between users (to be fair, any solution -not just Emby) and the Emby recommendations are no good at all. I mean check Netflix landing page and check default Emby. User engagement is on a totally different level. 
That's why to me it seemed a good idea to maintain and grow a set of items that was once signaled as suggested/curated. Apparently not everyone has the same mindset and I respect that. It is what it is. 

Not trying to prove a point or bitch about anything. Just trying to give my perspective on things. 

I'll add a option to tag library items as "top-pick-featured".

But, I'm not sure about having an option to remove those tags from library items.

Currently, top pick items are tagged in the top picks Library. We nuke that entire library everytime we refresh, so that is why those tags don't persist. If I tag library items, those tags will persist, and if a user wants to remove them, then that starts to generate code outside the scope of top picks.

 

[chef 3745]

On 11/29/2022 at 9:17 AM, horstepipe said:

Taking another look at the logs and at the browsers dev console, it is definitely a timeout error.

In nginx logs I'm seeing a 499 code, in browsers dev console I'm seeing a 524 code (this code comes from cloudflare if a request takes longer than 100 seconds).

It is working by bypassing cloudflare and nginx, not sure why it wasn't working before.

Any chance pulling the movie list in smaller chunks so it also works with cloudflare in place?

 

Are you still experiencing this @horstepipe?

I can slow down the library creation. It's threaded to make it fast, but it doesn't have to be.

[TheUrbanXplorer 36]

Hello @chef,
unfortunately I don't get to participate more here at the moment. But I wanted to raise a few points:

1. from the feeling not all user data are included. Actually only the newest releases appear in the list. It should be mentioned that newly added content is automatically changed to the release date for me (TimeLord plugins).
2. it never shows me all 9. Sometimes there are four, sometimes there are six(Why nine at all? A top twenty I would find zb. cooler, or the possibility to set the number itself.
3. in the library series and movies are displayed correctly, on the homescreen the individual episodes are displayed, not the series.
4. the option to exclude a library is still missing for me, e.g. to exclude the adult corner.
5. the display makes slight problems (screenshot see below).

The plugin is a cool thing and I gladly supported you with my purchase, but there is still a little room for improvement.

[chef 3745]

1 hour ago, TheUrbanXplorer said:

Hello @chef,
unfortunately I don't get to participate more here at the moment. But I wanted to raise a few points:

1. from the feeling not all user data are included. Actually only the newest releases appear in the list. It should be mentioned that newly added content is automatically changed to the release date for me (TimeLord plugins).
2. it never shows me all 9. Sometimes there are four, sometimes there are six(Why nine at all? A top twenty I would find zb. cooler, or the possibility to set the number itself.
3. in the library series and movies are displayed correctly, on the homescreen the individual episodes are displayed, not the series.
4. the option to exclude a library is still missing for me, e.g. to exclude the adult corner.
5. the display makes slight problems (screenshot see below).

The plugin is a cool thing and I gladly supported you with my purchase, but there is still a little room for improvement.

 

 

I'll try my best to work though your question, lets see if I can fix some of this.

 

1. Can you let me know what options are turned on in the configuration? Are both "Favor New releases", and "Favor Recently Added" option turned on or off?
2. Do you have parental controls enabled on this account? Is the option "Hide watched items from the home screen" enabled on your server?

The only reason there is 9 items is because double digit numbers get pretty crowded. The primary images look pretty bad.

This is a thumb image with lots of room to draw too. 

 

But I'm open to some ideas to create thumb images to handle this. If anyone who uses the plugin wants to get creative, and has some ideas about how to do a thumb and primary image layout that fits everything in. I can add thumb styles to the plugin.  That would be awesome! We could definitely create a top 20! that would be really great!

3. I need to know a little more about the this one. How are your series set up in the library? I think I might need a log as well. I can't think of a reason why episodes would be shown at the top level for series in top picks. A log might tell us more about why. I can get to the bottom of it, get it fixed  

4. That's not good! Do the unwanted  library items appear in the list after the engagement task? 

5. I can tell right away that the item in the rank 1 doesn't have metadata accessible to create the thumb images. This is most likely due to the German titles. I will check that the provider is returning data properly for different languages.

A couple follow up questions that may help me try and fix #5:

Do those items have images (like logos and backdrops) available in the library?

Has emby been able to obtain the images? 

Do providers like TMDB, and TVDB have images available for those items?

 

Thank you for the feedback @TheUrbanXplorer. as always your insights are much appreciated.  

 

 

[Painkiller8818 203]

18 hours ago, chef said:

and if a user wants to remove them, then that starts to generate code outside the scope of top picks.

i am not familiar with the code of emby but how about removing those tags at the beginning of the top pick generating task
so get all movies where tag like top-pick -> remove foreach, and let the task do its magic to tag the new ones.

Would this be a possible and less code solution?

Edited December 1, 2022 by Painkiller8818

[zhaojys 2]

how to install it? my emby is 4.6.7.0, need to update to higher version?

Edited December 2, 2022 by zhaojys

[Junglejim 351]

2 hours ago, zhaojys said:

how to install it? my emby is 4.6.7.0, need to update to higher version?

Hi mate, yea update emby if you can and then try to install. I seem to remember someone else had this issue...

Found it...

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Junglejim

[zhaojys 2]

58 minutes ago, Junglejim said:

Hi mate, yea update emby if you can and then try to install. I seem to remember someone else had this issue...

thank you, i got it in newest version.

[Junglejim 351]

45 minutes ago, zhaojys said:

thank you, i got it in newest version.

Cool, have fun.

[horstepipe 356]

20 hours ago, chef said:

Are you still experiencing this @horstepipe?

I can slow down the library creation. It's threaded to make it fast, but it doesn't have to be.

yes,

the problem is that this list does not load (because it is too big).

I'm seeing a similar issue for the reports plugin when accessing Emby through cloudflare.

Looks like as long as this list is not being loaded properly, top picks are not being created.

[woenk 57]

16 hours ago, chef said:

 

Do those items have images (like logos and backdrops) available in the library?

Has emby been able to obtain the images? 

Do providers like TMDB, and TVDB have images available for those items?

 

Why does Top Picks need to download all the things in the first place ?

Would it not be way easier if it just took all available data already on the server ?

 (dont know why it does not put the number from the Top Picks into the first picture this time ...)

 

 

Simply copying what is already there may sound "quick and dirty", but downloading it looks weird.

Also not sure how Top Picks makes the episode order, is it air date or DVD order ?

 

[Junglejim 351]

31 minutes ago, woenk said:

Why does Top Picks need to download all the things in the first place ?

Would it not be way easier if it just took all available data already on the server ?

 (dont know why it does not put the number from the Top Picks into the first picture this time ...)

 

 

Simply copying what is already there may sound "quick and dirty", but downloading it looks weird.

Also not sure how Top Picks makes the episode order, is it air date or DVD order ?

 

I think it's classed as a new library (virtual) so all meta gets scraped (in my case anyway). Have a look at the meta properties for the "Top Picks" library (scraper order for meta, images etc.). If you match your main lib's settings everything should equal out, hopefully. I think .. but not sure it will use some images that are in the main library? I don't store any images/nfo stuff with my main lib's so that's prob why it just re-scrapes everything for me.

I totally agree though, pulling the existing info/images from emby's db would be nice. Then all the AU cert's  that I alter would match.

Edited December 2, 2022 by Junglejim