Title sort order being ignored for unnumbered seasons/epsiodes

[Tonch_MS 4]

Hi,

I use a library designated as "TV shows" to save online videos to and manually enter metadata. Since online videos don't always fit neatly into specific topics or seasons or may not release sequentially, many of them go without season or episode numbers, and rely on the sort title to group them (i.e., Video 1, Video 2, and Video 3; and Stream 1, Stream 2, and Stream 3, in the same folder with no episode numbers).

 

This used to work for both episodes and seasons, but a recent update (I think in 4.8.11, possibly .10) screwed up how I was doing this, and was throwing neatly-nested folders all together into a big jumble unless they had specific season numbers attached to them. So I did that. I numbered each folder that represented a topic as a "season". This seemed to work for the seasons, but I noticed that if the episodes don't have specific numbers, they ignore the sort title and instead sort by release date with no way to specify otherwise.

I know this is a convoluted edge case, but it's essentially impossible for me to put a large library of such videos in any kind of rigid order. Videos that come out years apart may be related to each other and so should be paired next to each other instead of every video in release order. I'm mostly asking if there's a way to either fix this, or allow some kind of option to choose the sorting behavior.

 

INFO:

- Tried on both Emby Server 4.8.11 and 4.9.0.51 beta
- Hosted on an Ubuntu 24.04.2 Debian LXC on Proxmox

Steps to recreate:

1. Create a folder named "YouTube"
2. Create show folders inside the YouTube folder, i.e. Show 1, Show 2, Show 3
3. Within each show, create "season" folders, i.e. S1 - Stuff, S2 - Streams, S3 - Reviews
4. In each season folder, include videos that are not numbered (i.e. Video A, Video B, Video C; and Stream A, Stream B, Stream C). They will be assigned to each season, but have no episode numbers.
5. Add a library called "YouTube" to Emby, as media type TV shows. Disable any automatic metadata fetching.
6. Edit episode sort titles as desired
7. Add release date metadata to each video, in a different order than the intended sorting (Stream B might have come out, then Video A, then Stream C, but I want Stream B and C to be together)
8. If all is correct, the episodes should have season metadata but not episode numbers. They will be arranged according to their release dates, not their title sort order, with no obvious way to change it.

[GrimReaper 4116]

Why don't you use Home Videos & Photos content-type library instead? 

[Tonch_MS 4]

16 minutes ago, GrimReaper said:

Why don't you use Home Videos & Photos content-type library instead? 

If I remember right, that sorts using filenames and is a little less elegant. It doesn't, for example, show videos in the style of a playlist, it's more like just a folder of videos. It's not really what I want, since my method is really close to doing what I intend (and used to work before an update threw a wrench in it)

Edited May 4 by Tonch_MS

[GrimReaper 4116]

Ok then, so why don't you assign episode numbers instead in step 6 here:

35 minutes ago, Tonch_MS said:

• Edit episode sort titles as desired

? 

It's less work than editing Sort Titles and it'd enable you to reorganize episode list as desired? 

You're using TV shows type library, even though you're not fetching any online metadata, it's still slave to certain inner logic (it being TV shows content type library), expecting episode identifier:

https://emby.media/support/articles/TV-Naming.html#episode-naming-conventions

Quote

Episode naming conventions

A number of naming conventions are supported:

• show name - S01E01 - Episode Name.ext
• show name S01E01 Episode Name.ext
• anything_s01e02.ext
• anything_s1e2.ext
• anything_s01.e02.ext
• anything_s01_e02.ext
• anything_1x02.ext
• anything_102.ext
• anything_1x02.ext
• 02 Episode Name.ext
• s01e02.ext
• 1x02.ext

By date

Common for long-running daily shows, you can also use the date the episode aired.

• anything_1996.11.14.ext
• anything_1996-11-14.ext
• anything_14.11.1996.ext

As you're bypassing all that and providing only title, fallback to release date - not sort title - is correct behavior IMHO, as it stands to logic that a season of episodes is aired chronologically. 

Edited May 4 by GrimReaper

[Tonch_MS 4]

I suppose so, though a more flexible option would be nice.
It is an edge-case like I said, most people probably aren't using it this way. I guess I'll either have to delete the dates for all the videos, or decide on an arbitrary number order. The reason I was using sort order to begin with was that it's more flexible, so if a video comes out later on about an earlier topic, they can just be sorted together by title. Giving them a rigid number order would make this impossible unless I start numbering videos in tens to leave wiggle room for rearranging them.