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Some questions and maybe some feature requests


ChrisJ60

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ChrisJ60

I have just started evaluating Emby having tried many other media servers/organisers (Plex, Kodi, InFuse, Squire, …) and found them all wanting. So far I am very impressed with Emby for the following reasons:

 

1.    It seems to do a great job of extracting metadata from the media files themselves. All my media files are rigorously tagged the way I want them so I don’t want data form the Internet overriding my tag data.

 

2.    I guess as a result of (1), it seems to accept files and folders that are not quite organised in the ‘mandated’ folder/file structure. Again a must for me as for historic reasons a lot of my files do not conform to the expected file/folder structure.

 

However, I have encountered a few issues which I would like to get some input on and depending on the answers this may lead to a couple of feature requests. 

 

First a little background. I am running Emby (3.1.2.0) on a Mac Mini ‘server’ (macOS 10.12.2) . All my media files are store locally (on a Drobo disk array). All my media files are .m4v (video) or .m4a (audio) and are rigorously and thoroughly tagged. I have been testing Emby with the fetching of Internet metadata disabled for all libraries.

 

So here are my observations/questions:

 

1.  For Movies, Ebby seems to use the filename for the media file when naming the item in the library rather than the ‘Title’ tag from the media file. For example the file

 

…./Films/Pirates of the Caribbean/01 - The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003).m4v.

 

ends up in the library named ’01 - The Curse of the Black Pearl’ even though the title tag in the file says just ‘The Curse of the Black Pearl’. This seems strange to me - since Emby is clearly able to extract the Title tag why does it not use it in preference to the file name, falling back to the file name if there is no title tag? Is there any way to force this? if not then this would be my first feature request - for Emby to prefer using the ’Title’ tag from the file to name the item i the library and to only fall back to the file name if the Title tag is not present. If need be this could be controlled by a preference to avoid impacting anyone who relies on the existing behaviour.

 

2.   If one enables fetching of metadata from the Internet, then this seems to take precedence over metadata extracted from the files. I would like an option to reverse this; i.e. Emby would extract all available metadata from the files and use that and then just use the Internet fetching feature to ‘fill in the gaps’. For example, for a TV Show it would get, in my case, the show name, episode name, episode number, season number, episode artwork, episode description, … from the file metadata and then query the Internet and use the retrieved data for anythgi nthat is missing (show description, show artwork, season artwork, …). Does such an option already exist? if not then this would be my second feature request.

 

3.   In the web interface and the TV/iOS apps, season/series numbers seem to be often (though not always!)  displayed as two digits ’01’. It would be great to suppress leading zeros on these - Series 1 as it looks much nicer. Or maybe provide an option for this.

 

4.   For the case where Internet metadata fetching is disabled (my preferred mode of operation unless (2) above is addressed), it would be great to have some options for populating the Show/Season artwork; for example defaulting the Season/Series artwork to that of the first episode for that series and for the Show to that for the first series. It would also be neat ion Emby could pick up the ‘Show description’ from the relevant M4V tag.

 

I realise that one can manually edit/modify all of this stuff via Emby (and that is great) but when one is initially setting this up and you have some 550 Films and 364 TV Shows consisting of over 5,400 episodes it is helpful to not have to manually correct each one :-)

 

I’d appreciate thoughts/comments on these issues/requests.

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Hi @@ChrisJ60, thank you for the kind words !

For #1,  As far as embedded titles vs filename, what we're doing right now is what most users prefer, at least from what we've seen. The only way to change this would be to introduce a setting about the preferred source of the title. And that's definitely possible and has been requested before.

 

#2 is really the same answer.

 

For #3, if you're referring to the "Season 01" text, this actually comes from the Season Name. Depending on your settings this could come from different places. If you enabled MovieDb for Seasons, they actually have a season name in their metadata so we grab that. Otherwise it is probably coming from your season folder. Can we look at a specific example?

 

For #4, I haven't seen this requested before. The best thing to do is create a separate topic about this in the feature requests section:

 

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/forum/98-feature-requests/

 

Thanks !

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ChrisJ60

Hi @@Luke, thanks for your reply. I have a few comments/clarifications.

 

First, to re-iterate what I am looking for; a (set of) capabilities/options such that file metadata (by that I mean tags in files, not file names, folder names etc.) is used as far as possible and with the highest precedence when scanning media and adding it to the library. In this case the file/folder structure and naming should be pretty much irrelevant.

 

For #1 - the title issue - I think an option to take this from the title tag instead of the file name would be very beneficial. There are several reasons for this:

 

a)   File naming scheme may not correspond exactly to the title for many reasons

b )   At least in my case, the title tag (@nam) has the exact correct value.

c)   Some titles may genuinely contain special characters or non-English, non-Ascii characters that can, and are, problematic in some filesystems or for some applications and so cannot be used in file names.

 

For #2, I don't think this is really quite the same as #1 though of course it is related.

 

For #3, yes in those cases the folder is called 'Season 01' (I had to rename some folders as an experiment to get other media scanners such as Plex to recognise them - they seem to insist on two digit season/series numbers). But recognition is one thing and display is another; the leading zero should be suppressed. Again, if the metadata tags were used to get this information then there would not be any issues. Here is a specific example:

 

File path:   .../Media Library/Video/TV/32 Brinkburn Street/32 Brinkburn Street - s01e01.m4v

Key file tags: media (stik) = TV Show, title (@nam) = 'Episode 1', show (tvsh) = '32 Brinkburn Street', season number (tvsn) = 1, episode number (tves) = 1, date (@day) = 2011-03-28T00:00:00Z, show description (sdes) = descriptive text for show, episode description (ldes) = description for episode, artwork (covr) = square iTunes style artwork and many more...

 

So in this case (and the same is true for all our media) all relevant information is contained in the file metadata tags and that is really all that Emby needs to look at. No need to consider the folder or file names and no need to look up data on the Internet. I would like an option 9or maybe multiple options are needed) for Emby to apply this order of precedence when it processes media:

 

1.    Extract *all* relevant tags from the media file and use those with the highest priority.

2.    Only if key tags such as title, season/series number (for TV shows), episode number are not present then try and derive those from the folder/file name. 

3.    Optional: If some data is still missing, retrieve just the missing data from the Internet sources.

 

I'm happy to log feature request(s) for these options but I would like to know if (a) they will be seriously considered and ( b ) what kind of timeframe we might be looking at. I cannot commit to Emby with its current functionality but it is the closest organiser/player that I have found for my requirements to date (and I have looked at a lot of alternatives).

 

Regards,

 

Chris

Edited by ChrisJ60
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  • 3 weeks later...

hi @@ChrisJ60, yes i'm afraid the only way to handle this is going to be with a library scan to indicate a preference towards default title coming from embedded info vs file name. Luckily, this is a preference I've been planning on adding so I think it will help you. Thanks !

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  • 2 weeks later...

Is the default still going to be how it is now?  

If all my media is suddenly has different names that will not be good.

 

 

 

Hi, a setting to prefer file name vs embedded title is being added for the next release, thanks !

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