Series with multiple movies/OVAs in the middle?

[NerfHerder 2]

Is there any way of adding movies/OVAs in the correct watch order in a series, without just dumping them all into a Season 0/Specials folder? This solution feels clumsy at best, and really doesn't help with know what the correct watch order is, or if you've missed some essential part of a series.

[pwhodges 1531]

If the metadata includes information in the fields for which season they should show in and before what episode, then they will be displayed there (as well as in the specials folder).  This used to be a switchable option, but is now permanent.  If you want something not to be shown within a season in that way, you have to edit the metadata to remove those fields.

Flags (in this case set up by TVDB):

Result:

Paul

[NerfHerder 2]

24 minutes ago, pwhodges said:

If the metadata includes information in the fields for which season they should show in and before what episode, then they will be displayed there (as well as in the specials folder).  This used to be a switchable option, but is now permanent.  If you want something not to be shown within a season in that way, you have to edit the metadata to remove those fields.

Flags (in this case set up by TVDB):

Result:

Paul

Unfortunately, it straight up just.. doesn't identify anime films, as far as I can tell. Only OVAs. I've tried manually inputting the TVDB/IMDB IDs and it still doesn't work.

And if it did, it still doesn't really avoid the issue; films/spin offs that take place between seasons (i.e. Liz to Aoi Tori, Chikai no Finale, both of which are entire pieces of plot and are equally as important as whole series) simply aren't displayed as they should be.

Putting them in their own folders and labelling everything in watch order rather than absolute seasons breaks watch order, because this breaks all metadata links and apparently Emby isn't intelligent enough to fall back on literal sort-by-name order if it isn't ID'd via metadata.

I thought I'd almost found a solution, by labelling the films as season 2 (as they take place directly after season 2) and labelling them in the sort order as Season 2.2, Season 2.3, however you then ended up season 2's episodes duplicated in these folders too. That was until Emby straight up just began refusing to even display the films.

Edited March 7 by NerfHerder

[NerfHerder 2]

19 minutes ago, NerfHerder said:

...and apparently Emby isn't intelligent enough to fall back on literal sort-by-name order if it isn't ID'd via metadata.

I may have spoken far too soon here - my file-naming conventions were completely off. May actually have a solution. Will test and post update if it works

[NerfHerder 2]

Nope, I didn't speak to soon. There is absolutely zero way to account for this, outside of Specials, which isn't really a solution at all, and just dumps things from multiple points in the series into one folder.

It's the organizational equivalent of taking 2-3 books from the middle of a series of novels off of the shelf, throwing them all in a box and leaving the box on the floor next to the book case.

Edited March 7 by NerfHerder

[Luke 37071]

How are your files named and organized now? What exactly is happening now?

[NerfHerder 2]

2 minutes ago, Luke said:

How are your files named and organized now? What exactly is happening now?

I'm just using the standard file nomenclature now. I thought that perhaps fixing that might help, but it doesn't really make much difference.

Essentially, the only way I can add the films to the series without breaking the watch-order is by adding them to the specials. But then, visually these do not appear in the correct order on the show listing. They're hidden behind a "Specials" or Season 0 folder. For miscellaneous extras, special episodes, OVAs etc. I can see how/why this would make sense.

However, these aren't extras/specials that I'm trying to add! These are two full-length film productions that cover significant parts of the series, and from a narrative perspective, bridge a huge amount of content between the previous and upcoming series. Honestly, being able to define a custom display/watch order would be amazing. Hell, even just being able to symlink/reference a movie from my movie library and somehow indicate that it plays at X or Y point in series would be a game changer for things like this.

 

This isn't an isolated problem, either. I have quite a few series that I have the same issue with!

[pwhodges 1531]

8 hours ago, NerfHerder said:

Essentially, the only way I can add the films to the series without breaking the watch-order is by adding them to the specials. But then, visually these do not appear in the correct order on the show listing. They're hidden behind a "Specials" or Season 0 folder.

As I explained above, they appear where required if the information is in the metadata (whether from TVDB or manually added), and I gave an example showing exactly that.  This works just the same with multiple OVAs, or movies.  The fact that they are also in the Specials folder can just be ignored.

9 hours ago, NerfHerder said:

Hell, even just being able to symlink/reference a movie from my movie library and somehow indicate that it plays at X or Y point in series would be a game changer for things like this.

If you want the movie to be in a movie library (why, if it's an integral part of the series, and so presumably definable as a special), you can do this: have the movie in the movie library, and then add in the specials for the series a STRM file pointing to it, named as if it were the movie itself.

https://emby.media/support/articles/Strm-Files.html

Paul

[NerfHerder 2]

1 hour ago, pwhodges said:

As I explained above, they appear where required if the information is in the metadata (whether from TVDB or manually added), and I gave an example showing exactly that.  This works just the same with multiple OVAs, or movies.  The fact that they are also in the Specials folder can just be ignored.

If you want the movie to be in a movie library (why, if it's an integral part of the series, and so presumably definable as a special), you can do this: have the movie in the movie library, and then add in the specials for the series a STRM file pointing to it, named as if it were the movie itself.

https://emby.media/support/articles/Strm-Files.html

Paul

Well if it's an integral part of the series, surely it should show on the series page, in the correct place between the seasons, not just in the episode listing when you go into a season that it isn't part of?

It's not a special or an extra. It's a significant enough part of the series that it should be listed alongside each individual season.

[pwhodges 1531]

I guess you need to write a feature request.

Emby (or Plex, or Jellyfin) is based on the idea that metadata for a large amount of media can be acquired automatically and used to structure the access to that media.  You are asking for a mechanism for manually making arbitrary exceptions to that structuring (given that the metadata providers aren't going to help with this).  I can see the point, but I can also see that the developers are likely to see this as a low priority option, especially as I suspect this is only a significant issue with anime.  From my own point of view, I don't find it hard to know where things are and watch them in order using the present system.

Paul

[RanmaCanada 345]

listen to @pwhodgesHaving them named properly is the correct way (specials folder is great for organization).  If you have "specials" that don't have the proper metadata, yes you will have to fix that yourself as it's not up to the devs to correct this.  Many of us already do this with openings/endings and other special features that do not even exist on the tvdb, etc.  We've been dealing with this far longer than you.  There are some hills you just need to die on.  The devs can't just magically create a plugin that will intrinsicly know what goes where if there is no mention of it on the tvdb or other metadata sites.

[NerfHerder 2]

On 07/03/2024 at 14:11, RanmaCanada said:

listen to @pwhodgesHaving them named properly is the correct way (specials folder is great for organization).  If you have "specials" that don't have the proper metadata, yes you will have to fix that yourself as it's not up to the devs to correct this.  Many of us already do this with openings/endings and other special features that do not even exist on the tvdb, etc.  We've been dealing with this far longer than you.  There are some hills you just need to die on.  The devs can't just magically create a plugin that will intrinsicly know what goes where if there is no mention of it on the tvdb or other metadata sites.

A ) Read what I actually wrote, that was not the issue

B )

Quote

We've been dealing with this far longer than you

I doubt it.

C ) At no point did I suggest that they should "magically create" some mind-reading plugin. I'm asking for the ability to create arbitrary, manual overrides to listings/watch orders.

But thanks for the patronizing tone, I guess?

[NerfHerder 2]

On 07/03/2024 at 13:50, pwhodges said:

I guess you need to write a feature request.

Emby (or Plex, or Jellyfin) is based on the idea that metadata for a large amount of media can be acquired automatically and used to structure the access to that media.  You are asking for a mechanism for manually making arbitrary exceptions to that structuring (given that the metadata providers aren't going to help with this).  I can see the point, but I can also see that the developers are likely to see this as a low priority option, especially as I suspect this is only a significant issue with anime.  From my own point of view, I don't find it hard to know where things are and watch them in order using the present system.

Paul

You might not have any issue with it, but the other people watching things on my server don't know what collections are, or whether they should go look for collections—but only for specific series—rather than just going into the library titled "anime" when they want to watch an anime. Not that collections actually solve the problem either. You STILL can't have everything in the correct order, and have Emby take you to that collection from a TV Show library.

In order to have everything in the correct order, you have to add individual seasons to a collection.

In order for the shows listing in the library to take you to that collection, you have to add the entire show as a collection, which then just dumps the listing for the show as a whole in the library, meaning that you can't correctly order anything, somewhat defeating the point. This applies even when the minimum number for collections in that library is set to 1, too.

And yeah, it's not as if a significant portion of Emby's user base watches anime in 2024 or anything, right? It's practically niche!

Frankly, the only reason I haven't switched to another media server at this point is because Emby has clients for just about every platform. As of late, I've had a pretty terrible experience with Emby in general. And just about every question/problem/suggestion that I have is met with non-solutions and snarky comments.

Edited April 14 by NerfHerder