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Advice for setting up Documentary focused Emby


gwydionjhr

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gwydionjhr

A little context.

 

I have a library of 4000+ documentaries I started building in 2006.  Originally I burned them to DVDs to watch. For the past 5 years I've used DLNA, Samsung's PC Share Manager to 3 DLNA capable TVs to watch them.  And despite all the flack DLNA gets, it's actually worked quite well.

 

Because of the nature of how I started and where I'm at, plus the nature of the content, my folder structure and naming conventions are WAY off what is required for out-of-the-box solutions like PLEX or emby.  I tried to give PLEX a go, and even paid for the PLEX Metadata Editor, but could never get it to install properly on my Win8.1 machine (I wasn't the only user with this issue)

 

emby seems to offer native metadata editing, so I'd like to give it a go.  But I'm asking for advice before I get started so I don't start down a dead end path.

 

A) Because of the nature of documentaries and my use of DLNA I don't have my titles grouped by individual folders.  Putting single episode documentaries in individual folders makes navigating via DLNA a nightmare.  My collection is organized in folders by topic.  History, Science, Art, etc.  When I'm looking for something to watch I prefer to browse a topic that interests me at that moment, I don't go looking for a specific title.

 

B) Also, because of the use of DLNA, I've renamed almost every single title over the years.  Whether it was removing the periods between each word, or deleting information in the original file name that was more clutter than anything else.  Very few documentaries have "S01E01" in their file name to begin with anyway.

 

While editing the metadata for 4000+ files seems like a crazy task, I have no issues doing so.  It's something I can do in small bits over many days.

 

So the question is, HOW do I do it?  I've spent the last 24hours reading as much as I can here in the forums, and the github wiki's, and I can't find a clear step-by-step how-to anywhere.  What I have found assumes the user has a level of understanding higher than what I've got.  The most glaring example being many references to things like the TVdb ID#, and yet in no place does it actually show you WHERE you get this information.

 

1) Is the use of individual folders done in programs like emby so that the metadata information (images, etc) don't get confused with other files that would be in the same folder in a library like mine?

 

1a) If the above is true, and I would have to re-organize my library into hundreds, if not thousands of individual folders, could I edit the genre of each file so that I could continue to browse my library by topics of my choosing? 

 

2) What IS the best Media Library Content type choice for an collection like mine?  Suggestions in the forums are conflicting.

2a) Unset comes up quite frequently.  But if I choose that option, grabbing metadata from TVdb, which seems to offer the best coverage for metadata of documentaries, is not offered

 

I'd love to make this work, and I have no shortage of patience, I just need some help getting my head around the best way to go about it, and how to do it.

Edited by gwydionjhr
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Vidman

Your best bet to start would be to use a renaming tool like filebot this can rename items (including adding individual folders) based on filename or by matching to online resources such as tvdb.org

The emby metadata editor is quite good but doesn't do any file management or batch operations (yet;))

If most of your documentaries can be found on tvdb.org or tmdb.org I would use TV show or movie as the content type

 

 

Probably the reason there is not much info about where to get tvdb id# is that you shouldn't need to, emby will get it for you either fully automatically or by using the identify button in the metadata editor to search for the title and emby will fill in the tvdb info.

 

So the process I use is to use filebot to identity and rename my files so emby automatically identifies them, I also set emby to store metadata in the media folders so if I ever need to rebuild my library or switch to another server machine I won't need to download everything again

Also you can still use your current browsing method by genre/topic by assigning genres in metadata without worrying about folder/file structure

Edited by Vidman
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chef

Do all your documentary file names contain the name of the series that they belong to?

 

There is one other possible quick organize if they do.

Edited by chef
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gwydionjhr

Many don't belong to any series at all.  Which is why I group them together in folders by topic.

 

Like I said, I have no problem doing the work to associate the appropriate metadata with the individual shows, but I want the end result to be something usable.

 

IF I can assign my own genre to each file, I'd put them each (back) into their own folder to keep emby happy, just so long as when I bring up emby on the device I can browser through each genre as a collection.

 

Spent more hours poking around the net.  It seems that the issue with Documentaries has not been adequately addressed by any service I can find.

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Vidman

Yes you can add each one to a collection. ...or as i said you can fill in the genre field and the server will group them for you...the good thing about this is an item can have more than one genre if you choose so for example a doco about a famous sports person could be listed under both "biography" and "sports" without much effort

Edited by Vidman
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gwydionjhr

What would happen if I was to use a metadata editor like MetaX to craft the metadata for my library before setting up emby?  Anyone have any experience with this approach?  I'm just thinking if I'm going to do all this work, it might be better to do it natively to each file so it is available for other programs down the road.

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I'm pretty sure you can set it to create xml, nfo etc so it plays nice with other players...

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gwydionjhr

So the question is, HOW do I do it?  I've spent the last 24hours reading as much as I can here in the forums, and the github wiki's, and I can't find a clear step-by-step how-to anywhere.  What I have found assumes the user has a level of understanding higher than what I've got.  The most glaring example being many references to things like the TVdb ID#, and yet in no place does it actually show you WHERE you get this information.

 

 

OK, so HOW do I do it?

 

If I use the "Unset" category, I don't have the option to use TVdb as a source (even if I understood how to do that)

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gwydionjhr

I'm pretty sure you can set it to create xml, nfo etc so it plays nice with other players...

 

What's the difference between the two, and which one is preferred?

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Used by different media viewers. Kodi,plex,emby.. Best bet is just to create them all i guess!

Edited by Lee
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