Language issue when setting up different librairies with same folders

[innos 0]

I recently switched over to Emby from Plex and while me and the households of my siblings are perfectly fine with having Emby in English our parents don't speak any English at all, so we had to find a way to have the metadata on Emby in Hungarian as well.

Since you can't have multi-language libraries where users can just switch to another metadata language on the client side, I've tried to create new libraries with a different metadata language but with the same folders, and then I would hide the English libraries from my parents' user accounts. This is how my Plex was set up and this setup worked fine on Plex without issues, but for some reason on Emby my new Hungarian language libraries didn't want to switch over to Hungarian, no matter what I did. I've double-checked the library metadata settings multiple times, I've restarted Emby, I forcefully refreshed all the metadata for my new libraries, but nothing worked.

I noticed that when I was refreshing the metadata for my new libraries the percentage icon also appeared on top of my old English libraries that were sharing the same folders with my new libraries, which made me think that because these libraries happen to share the same folders for some reason Emby treats them as if they were actually the same library, and that's why it was refusing to switch over from English because that's the metadata language of my old library.

I've tried searching the Emby forums and Google, but I couldn't find anything about this issue. But I did see a comment that said that having libraries with the same folders can cause issues and bugs, which further confirmed my suspicion that these different libraries were treated by Emby as if they were the same library.

As a temporary solution to this issue, I thought that for my new Hungarian libraries, I had to have new folder paths that differed from the ones that the old English ones use. Since making copies of my video folders, which take up multiple terabytes, would be a waste of space and time, I thought of creating Symbolic Links at a different location that point to my video folders, and using the folder path of my Symbolic Links I would be able to trick Emby into thinking these are different folders.

Since I host my Emby server on Windows I used an app called Link Shell Extension to create the Symbolic Links.

For example, this is the folders of my old English movie library:

And this is the new folder path I made using Symbolic Links:

After I did this Emby finally switched over the metadata language of my new libraries to Hungarian.

I wrote this all down not only just to report this issue, but also help those who might encounter this same issue in the future.

[Abobader 2956]

Hello innos,

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Please wait for someone from staff support or our members to reply to you.

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Emby Team

[Luke 37231]

Quote

Since you can't have multi-language libraries where users can just switch to another metadata language on the client side, I've tried to create new libraries with a different metadata language but with the same folders, and then I would hide the English libraries from my parents' user accounts.

Hi, this is currently not supported. You can use the same folder in more than one library, but they need to have the same library options otherwise things will get unpredictable.

In other words, no matter how many times you add the same folder, it's still one record in your emby database and only gets one set of library options.

[innos 0]

Thank you for your reply. So it seems my suspicions were indeed correct. Are there plans to change this in the future?

[Luke 37231]

The idea of storing data for multiple languages has come up before and is possible for future updates. Thanks.