How can I properly identify seasons and episodes in Emby?

[AngelSing 14]

Greetings,

Is there a way to identify a season of a series in Emby? I’ve encountered several anime series where seasons are released in parts, each with its own advertising, different release dates, and even a unique identifier, like those managed by AniDB.net. This site is one of the most comprehensive metadata collectors for anime, but Emby does not integrate an official plugin for it, unlike Jellyfin.

Currently, Emby only has the functionality to identify complete series, but not individual seasons or episodes. This becomes an issue when organizing series with seasons split into parts. For example, if I have a season divided into Part 1 and Part 2, and in my directory, I place them as "Season 1" and "Season 2," Emby automatically interprets "Season 2" as the second season. However, that’s not correct, as both are part of the same season.

I tried copying and pasting the corresponding IDs from AniDB.net into the metadata and then updating it, but Emby doesn’t recognize them. AniDB.net would be an excellent option because it organizes seasons and episodes in great detail, assigning them unique IDs. However, the real issue is that Emby lacks the functionality to identify seasons and episodes accurately. If Emby developed this feature, integrating AniDB.net as a plugin would be ideal, as it would allow selecting seasons and episodes based on those IDs.

That said, is there any way to achieve this level of organization in Emby? Is there a way to have seasons identified correctly without solely relying on folder names? I would appreciate any suggestions to resolve this issue.

[AngelSing 14]

I believe the only way to do this is manually, assigning each season and episode one by one. This is a tedious task that could be avoided if Emby allowed seasons and episodes to be identified in the same way it handles series and movies.

[rbjtech 4778]

Have you tried specifying absolute order (ie each epsiode is just incremented by 1) and simply put the correct files into the correctly named folder - then rename that 'Season' (in emby) when you are done.

https://www.thetvdb.com/series/spy-x-family/seasons/absolute/1

In that show's metadata - you then need to specify the Absolute order..

Edited November 27 by rbjtech

[AngelSing 14]

23 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

Have you tried specifying absolute order (ie each epsiode is just incremented by 1) and simply put the correct files into the correctly named folder - then rename that 'Season' (in emby) when you are done.

https://www.thetvdb.com/series/spy-x-family/seasons/absolute/1

In that show's metadata - you then need to specify the Absolute order..

Thank you for your suggestion, but I believe it doesn't align with what I'm looking for. Using absolute order organizes all content (episodes, specials, movies) as if they were part of a single continuous season, which is not my intention.

What I actually want is:

1. To visually separate the parts of the same season. For example, I want Season 1 Part 1 and Season 1 Part 2 to appear as independent sections in the series' "Seasons" view.

2. To include movies within the series but organized chronologically. I want the movies to be correctly positioned between the seasons, reflecting their place in the storyline's timeline.

With the method you suggested, everything would appear grouped under a single season in the interface, which doesn't allow me to differentiate between parts or properly organize the movies within the series.

Do you know of any way to have the parts of a season and movies appear as separate seasons in the list while maintaining chronological order? Any additional advice would be greatly appreciated.

[pwhodges 1717]

The only way I know of to present "seasons" in an unsupported manner is to place them in folders with unsupported names.  Emby then doesn't know what to do with them and just displays them in alphabetical order.  But given that the files need to have the season and episode number in their names to be recognised, Emby may well do something unexpected when it recognises them - I have had inconsistent results on the several occasions I've tried this technique, and the behaviour can't be guaranteed to remain the same in different releases of Emby.

The way to true happiness in this regard is to choose the ordering you are most comfortable with in whichever database you like (but remember that the identification is done using the first DB configured at the library level, not for individual shows), which may be one of the defaults (TVDB, TMDB) or one of the various anime databases which can be chosen after installing the various Plugins that define them.

My experience is that simply using TVDB (the default for shows) is the best for anime - the specific anime database gave me all kinds of grief.

Paul

[AngelSing 14]

28 minutes ago, pwhodges said:

The only way I know of to present "seasons" in an unsupported manner is to place them in folders with unsupported names.  Emby then doesn't know what to do with them and just displays them in alphabetical order.  But given that the files need to have the season and episode number in their names to be recognised, Emby may well do something unexpected when it recognises them - I have had inconsistent results on the several occasions I've tried this technique, and the behaviour can't be guaranteed to remain the same in different releases of Emby.

The way to true happiness in this regard is to choose the ordering you are most comfortable with in whichever database you like (but remember that the identification is done using the first DB configured at the library level, not for individual shows), which may be one of the defaults (TVDB, TMDB) or one of the various anime databases which can be chosen after installing the various Plugins that define them.

My experience is that simply using TVDB (the default for shows) is the best for anime - the specific anime database gave me all kinds of grief.

Paul

I think Emby should enable an option to identify seasons and episodes using IDs. This would make it much easier to organize content according to the user's preferences. For example, TVDB is not as precise as AniDB when it comes to separating content; TVDB groups parts like "Part 1" and "Part 2" under a single ID, as if they were released on the same date. On the other hand, AniDB assigns different IDs for each part, allowing for clearer differentiation.

If Emby allowed seasons and episodes to be identified using IDs, it would create a much more customizable environment that better suits users' visual needs. Personally, I prefer to maintain a more specific order based on release dates and chronological order.

[rbjtech 4778]

45 minutes ago, AngelSing said:

Thank you for your suggestion, but I believe it doesn't align with what I'm looking for. Using absolute order organizes all content (episodes, specials, movies) as if they were part of a single continuous season, which is not my intention.

What I actually want is:

1. To visually separate the parts of the same season. For example, I want Season 1 Part 1 and Season 1 Part 2 to appear as independent sections in the series' "Seasons" view.

2. To include movies within the series but organized chronologically. I want the movies to be correctly positioned between the seasons, reflecting their place in the storyline's timeline.

With the method you suggested, everything would appear grouped under a single season in the interface, which doesn't allow me to differentiate between parts or properly organize the movies within the series.

Do you know of any way to have the parts of a season and movies appear as separate seasons in the list while maintaining chronological order? Any additional advice would be greatly appreciated.

That's what I'm suggesting - put them into different folders - and then simply name them.

This is what I have done for top gear specials (as an example) - they are all s01exx - but they are in different folders - thus show as different 'specials'

You should be able to do the same with this show.

The reason to use absolute - is if you use normal seasons, then I think this may overwite or confuse the folders they are in.

 

[AngelSing 14]

5 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

That's what I'm suggesting - put them into different folders - and then simply name them.

This is what I have done for top gear specials (as an example) - they are all s01exx - but they are in different folders - thus show as different 'specials'

You should be able to do the same with this show.

The reason to use absolute - is if you use normal seasons, then I think this may overwite or confuse the folders they are in.

 

A question, and sorry for my ignorance, but could you give me a clear example of how I should rename the folders and episodes?

[rbjtech 4778]

Just tested it on Season 1 items - and it only appears to work on Season 0 items (specials) ...

Emby tries to be clever, and simply uses the filename (s01exx) to put it into the existing Season 1 folder - ie not what you want ...

so

'Best Of' is in a folder called ..\top gear\Best Of\  and has many s00exx files

'Specials' is in a folder called ..\top gear\Season 0\ and has many s00exx files

'Series 1' is in ..\top gear\Season 1\ and has s01exx files

But what you cannot do - is split Season 1 - and put a 'part 2' into another folder - because emby just reasembles it.

Thus it seemingly only works for specials ..

 

Edited November 27 by rbjtech

[ComposerLOST 0]

I'm having a similar issue so I figured I'd add to this thread instead of starting my own; mods - let me know if you'd prefer it be separate!

I'm having an issue with getting Emby to recognize OVAs (with their own IDs) that are in the same folder as their parent series. The one I'm currently working on is Darker than Black, so I'll use that for my example.

This is the chronological order of the series:

• Season 1 - 2007, TVdb=80042
• OVA (Beneath the Cherry Blossoms [...]) - 2008, TVdb=345357
• OVA (Gaiden) - 2010, TVdb=433039
• Season 2 - 2009, 80042

As you can see, TVdb considers the two official seasons as one show (even though the first season was originally meant to be a single-season anime), but both specials are separate. I'd like them to all appear under the same series, but currently Emby can recognize the two official seasons and not the OVAs even if I manually add the TVdb ID to them. (I also tried putting it in the folder names, which was recommended somewhere else.)

This is what the folder structure looks like.

This is how it currently looks in Emby. The two OVAs don't have any metadata for the episodes or any summary, etc.

It'd only be 5 episodes for me to manually add the metadata for, so I might just do that, but I'm quite sure I'll run into the same problem again with another show so it'd be nicer if I could figure out a way to get Emby to recognize them. Is there anything I can do here? 

[ComposerLOST 0]

Sorry to double-post; tried to edit but it wouldn't let me.

I did figure out a way to cheat it, which isn't the most efficient but it works. Basically, just separate/combine everything to mirror how its laid out in TVdb--in this case, I moved the two specials into their own folders, for another I had to combine two seasons into one--let Emby identify everything and add all the metadata, then re-combine/separate everything, making sure to move the thumbnails and .nfo files for the episodes with the video files. Refresh the page/rescan the files, and Emby should still recognize everything while correctly splitting/combining according to the folder structure. Then you can manually edit the couple of things that need editing (season number, season/special titles, whatever else) and lock it so that it doesn't get overwritten.

Like I said, not super efficient, but it works and is definitely less painful than manually entering the metadata for a bunch of episodes yourself. Still, if there is a better way I would love to hear it!

[pwhodges 1717]

Darker than Black doesn't require any special handling; just number the episodes to match TVDB, with the OVAs in the Specials folder numbered from s00e01 to s00e05.

You will then get three folders:

The first folder contains the specials - you can't hide this, sadly, but keep going...

But the metadata provided by TVDB includes the positions that the OVAs fit in, so looking in each season we get:

@LukeIt would be logical if specials that are displayed within seasons were hidden from the Specials folder (which would then vanish when empty), but Emby haven't done that (yet?).  The present behaviour has the undesirable side effect that in the displayed total count of unwatched episodes, those specials count twice, which is misleading.

Hope that helps.

Paul

[AngelSing 14]

Greetings, @pwhodges

So, would it be enough to place the specials in the Season 0 folder for them to automatically appear in chronological order within the seasons? Even so, I still want to divide the seasons into their respective parts, but so far, I haven’t been able to do it. Doing this manually is a very tedious task. I think the solution to this issue would be to add the option to identify both seasons and episodes, and also integrate AniDB natively for metadata identification, as it organizes each part and episode very well using specific IDs.

Additionally, I’d like the specials, such as movies, to have their own cover and synopsis within the same series. This could be possible by altering the season name in the directories, but it would require including an identifier in the metadata. For instance, the Season 03 folder could identify Season 2 in the metadata, while the Season 02 folder could represent a movie or OVA with its own metadata, cover, etc.

In summary, this is one way I imagine it could work, but perhaps there’s a more efficient way to implement it.

Thank you for considering these ideas!

[pwhodges 1717]

As we've noted earlier, this would need a substantial amount of redesign.  Given that this is mainly an issue with anime, which is still quite a niche market, and given that many people (like me) are content to fit within the present possibilities, I don't suppose a change in this area will be addressed soon, certainly not, given the scale of other developments known to be in the pipeline.

The Anime plugin gives access to AniDB, but from the description I'm not clear if it can be used for identification rather than just additional data.  In the past when I tried it I got in an awful mess - but I knew a lot less about how Emby works at that time, so it may just have been me.

Incidentally, all metadata fetchers are plugins, even the default ones (which is why they show in the catalogue) - that's how Emby is structured - so none is more "integrated" than another;  any difference with the Anime plugin is just a matter of the level of support..

Paul

[AngelSing 14]

1 hour ago, pwhodges said:

As we've noted earlier, this would need a substantial amount of redesign.  Given that this is mainly an issue with anime, which is still quite a niche market, and given that many people (like me) are content to fit within the present possibilities, I don't suppose a change in this area will be addressed soon, certainly not, given the scale of other developments known to be in the pipeline.

The Anime plugin gives access to AniDB, but from the description I'm not clear if it can be used for identification rather than just additional data.  In the past when I tried it I got in an awful mess - but I knew a lot less about how Emby works at that time, so it may just have been me.

Incidentally, all metadata fetchers are plugins, even the default ones (which is why they show in the catalogue) - that's how Emby is structured - so none is more "integrated" than another;  any difference with the Anime plugin is just a matter of the level of support..

Paul

Don’t tell me that, bro. I specifically switched from Jellyfin to Emby and purchased the lifetime license expecting better updates in this area. I thought that with several paid features, it would have better development. At least in Jellyfin, I could do it, although not exactly in the way I describe here. For some reason, Jellyfin identified the season based more on the filenames than on the folder name.

Regarding AniDB IDs, I mean they’re more integrated with the system. In Jellyfin, I could add AniDB IDs directly to the episodes, which isn’t possible in Emby. I suppose it’s because Jellyfin has a dedicated AniDB plugin, whereas Emby has a plugin that integrates several anime metadata sources, including AniDB, but it’s not as complete as a dedicated plugin.

I guess I should’ve researched more before migrating to Emby.

Edited November 30 by AngelSing

[Luke 38528]

Hi, I've pushed an update to the Emby anime plugin to add support for that. Thanks.