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Plex to Emby Migration


Jack.Landrum

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Jack.Landrum

Due to Plex drastic changes to the UI on Roku devices on 12/6/2018 a lot of long term Plex users are moving to Emby. - I am one of those users.

 

I started the migration the same day and have one big question.

 

Is there anyway to move the existing meta data from Plex into Emby?

1. Movie & TV show matching that have already been corrected in PLEX.

2. Custom/Not default Art Work already selected in Plex.

 

Thanks in advance to anyone that can save me and others hours and hours of getting our servers back in order.

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Perplexed

The bad news: you can't import any Plex settings.

 

The good news is that with Emby you can store all custom art and other information within the libraries themselves, meaning that even after a reinstallation most of your settings will seamlessly import again from then on!

 

I "fled" Plex a few months ago when they rendered my Android app unusable and never looked back... Emby is simply the better product right now.

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Hi Guys... I don't have much to add here, just wanted to drop a note saying that I'm going through a Plex -> Emby migration as well this afternoon. I tried Emby quite a while ago but went back to plex with my head low... I'm gonna try again and give it a real shot. I have heard good things about the Emby Support... So, ya... looking forward to That Change!

 

My Library is not HUGE, but I have spent some time at it. So far, watched history is what I am missing...

Edited by R2Rn
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kanipek

Due to Plex drastic changes to the UI on Roku devices on 12/6/2018 a lot of long term Plex users are moving to Emby. - I am one of those users.

 

I started the migration the same day and have one big question.

 

Is there anyway to move the existing meta data from Plex into Emby?

1. Movie & TV show matching that have already been corrected in PLEX.

2. Custom/Not default Art Work already selected in Plex.

 

Thanks in advance to anyone that can save me and others hours and hours of getting our servers back in order.

File naming and organization is the key for correct ID. Not just in Emby but many others including Plex - though Plex seems better at identifying files named in unconventional ways.

 

If you have a large library to migrate and no locally stored metadata you have a bit of work to do. Emby does a good job grabbing the correct metadata, but you need to follow a supported method when naming and organizing. If you do that up front - naming and organizing --you'll have far far fewer issues.

 

Library Setup:

https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Wiki/wiki/Library-Setup

 

I personally use showname.S##E##.Episodename.mp4(mkv/avi/mpg) -- the rare issue I have and they are extremely rare are generally associated with and original series and reboot(s) series.

 

Also - If you have a situation such as you have the original MacGyver in your Library and you are adding/recording the reboot series Make sure your add the year to the series name -- MacGyver (1985) and MacGyver (2016), Doctor Who is another example. Though if you are coming from Plex you probably are already doing that (I had to do that when I was playing around with Plex otherwise they got combined or only showed 1 of the 2 shows).

 

Artwork -- Recommend you store it locally with your media files. If you have custom artwork not stored locally currently -- move it ahead of time, before you set up the libraries and follow naming conventions. I believe Emby follows pretty much what Kodi does as far as naming conventions for artwork. Though for films organized into single film per folder (how I do it) the media file name doesn't have to be included -- Example: The Godfather (1972)-poster.jpg will work but poster.jpg works also. Again that is single file-single folder -- \The Godfather (1972)\The godfather (1972).mp4.

 

Plenty of help here in the forums if you have issues.

 

Welcome aboard!

Edited by kanipek
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mastrmind11

You should be able to use trakt to migrate your watched status.  Set it up in plex, sync state, import state into emby.  I've never tried this, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Edited by mastrmind11
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Perplexed

Since we're off topic and this is sort of an appropriate topic talking about Plex to Emby, I have a question:

 

Has Emby noticed any influx in Emby users this past week? I see dozens (perhaps hundreds) of posts in the Plex forums where people are saying they are not satisfied with Plex's latest updates, and going to try Emby... I'm wondering if that was noticeable here at all or are most users in Plex just saying that but not actually following up on it?

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Oh... Goodness...

So, I spent A LOT of time on this yesterday... too much methinks.

 

I was hoping I that things would go relatively smooth, as I said above I don't have a huge library... Movies went OK. Not perfectly smooth but OK for the most part. Scanning did pretty good and I only had to man-handle a few items.

 

Shows was a bit of a Gong Show... really made me appreciate how forgiving the Plex Scanner-Agent system is... Good Job Plex! I already miss how easy it was for me to simply create my Own S-A if needed. I had only a few shows that were mis-identified (and they were REALLY off :) ) All of them needed some hand-holding and brute force to get right, NatGeo's Genius was the one that gave me the most grief as it refused to lay still and let me do my thing... in the end I won that battle too.

 

Music, though! good gawd...

My server spends about 75% of its workday serving music. I keep my library clean and (mostly) organized. Tags are pretty good, I fix 'em as I find 'em.
I added my library to Emby and let it chew on it for a LONG while to find that it did an OK job with albums, but did not even try to find Artist Images as far as I could tell. I tweaked the settings and tried again a few times. Then grabbed one Artist that I thought would be easy (ie: a Perfect Circle), Tried Identify and got nothing but a screen load of yellow boxes... Tried Edit Images and found black boxes (data-imageurl = fanart link) which looked promising but, alas, the Link is DEAD as in cant connect to server assets.fanart.tv . Obviously the DL button wont work.  Looks like Fanart may be having trouble with their API or servers... Anyhow, back to My Mess...

 

Deleted entire Emby Music Library and started small... One Artist One Album. Installed LastFM downloader. made it number one for artist images. re scan... Nope... Another new music Librarry... one atrist, ONLY lastFM downloader active, scanned, nope... Edit Images->Primary, FanArt STILL showing blanks in first two positions (with FA disabled) , but LFM shows a good one in #3!  So... LFM is finding a good image but Library is refusing to use it without Me manually adding it... I Can Not do this for my entire library...

 

This was about the time I would normally just go back to Plex with my tail between my legs... But I want to work through this. Sorry for the long winded report here, I Know this is not the place for a bug report and that's not what I'm trying to do... When I have tried everything I can I'll find the right forum for some real questions. 
 

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Regarding TV - we're happy to look at examples and improve our scanning process.

 

For music - yes there are some issues in 3.5 that have been significantly improved in 3.6, although the current fanart.tv outages are currently impacting both versions.

 

What version did you install?

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Hi-ya Luke... funny you should ask.

I originally was using the portable 3.5x setup. I have since partly abandoned that in favor of a fresh install of 3.6.0.76

 

I did an experiment with everything fresh, one music library, one artist, one album, proper folder structure (music/Tool/Undertow/ ....

in library settings I moved theAudioDB to the top of the lists, and disabled MBz and FA for now. For Artist Image Fetcher settings I have only Primary selected.

Scan and Update. Blank Artist Image... When I click edit images for artist image, the dialog shows blanks for Primary, Logo and Backdrop (though I only asked for primary), clicking on Primary Search shows 4 blanks from FanArt (though I purposly deselected/deactivated FA in library settings) and a perfect image in the fifth spot from TheAudioDB which I can DL manually.

 

Does this sound like the expected behavior to you? (keeping the FA troubles in mind). I could well be missing some thing. Thanks for your time.

Aaron

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Regarding TV - we're happy to look at examples and improve our scanning process.

 

Sorry... I blew right past this question... Some of my troubles just came from being a bit sloppy with naming. But I'll give you two examples that stumbled on 3.6 ;

 

The Americans. I renamed the folder to The  Americans 2013 thinking that may help, but a fresh library with default settings insisted this was the 1961 Show and I had to Identify it manually. It fell in line.

A Tricky one though is NatGeo's Genius series.  It's not found in tTVDB so... ya... not the fault of Emby. Strangely, on 3.6 it WAS identified, though the images were a bit wack... No Biggie.

 

Aaron.

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Sorry... I blew right past this question... Some of my troubles just came from being a bit sloppy with naming. But I'll give you two examples that stumbled on 3.6 ;

 

The Americans. I renamed the folder to The  Americans 2013 thinking that may help, but a fresh library with default settings insisted this was the 1961 Show and I had to Identify it manually. It fell in line.

A Tricky one though is NatGeo's Genius series.  It's not found in tTVDB so... ya... not the fault of Emby. Strangely, on 3.6 it WAS identified, though the images were a bit wack... No Biggie.

 

Aaron.

 

Did you try "The Americans (2013)" ?

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Did you try "The Americans (2013)" ?

 

I did not.... But for fun I'll try it once more like that. great suggestion.

 

Edit:

annnd... That seemed to work! I don't think I missed anything when I removed the show, but when I placed it back and scanned Emby had no trouble picking it up and assigning the proper names/images.  Thank You.

 

Edit2:

Ah-Ha! This ALSO helped immensely with Genius (2017) !  Not perfect, but SO Close with no manual help. (I had also cleaned up the Seasons organization, so I'm not sure if that helped as well) Thanks!

 

Aaron

Edited by R2Rn
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Deathsquirrel

@@R2Rn the trick is just to name the show whatever it's called on thetvdb, assuming that's your primary TV metadata source.  That includes the show year in parentheses if it exists.

 

That works really well for most TV shows though some anime fans aren't crazy about that and prefer to use the animedb plugin for those shows.

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Jack.Landrum

Yeah most of troubles stem from improper naming.

I used to be very anal about it, but about 2-3 years ago I just starting fixing any issues on the PLEX side only.

Now I am paying for my laziness due to the unexpected betrayal by PLEX towards their user base.

 

I really am loving that EMBY saves the posters that I pick.

 

Please EMBY never change your UI to be like PLEX the new wanna be NETLFIX.

 

Stay focused on being a Personal MEDIA APP and not a "Web CONTENT" APP (translation: cash grab) like PLEX has stated in their "new mission statement", and I will stay focused on EMBY. :)

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Coxeroni

I have to add that for me Emby was at least comparable to Plex when indentifying my TV Shows and movies, if not a tad bit better.

 

As @@mastrmind11 noted, watch state can be imported via trakt, works well for me.

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Jack.Landrum

5c0e834bdc9af_Capture.png

When I am setting images on one series and return to the "ALL Shows" page, sometimes that happens.

Any ideas? Is this a known bug?

My guess would be the browser I'm using which is Palemoon.

I will try the current Firefox and see if it happens there also.  

If I refresh the page they reset to the correct posters.

Edited by Jack.Landrum
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beckfield

I added my library to Emby and let it chew on it for a LONG while to find that it did an OK job with albums, but did not even try to find Artist Images as far as I could tell.

 

With regard to music images, one thing I just found in the Emby Help files is that Emby doesn't support "artist.jpg" or "album.jpg."  Instead, it looks like it needs to be "folder.jpg (I presume this is the Artist image)" and "cover.jpg (album image)."  Plex will recognize either, but, at least according to the documentation, Emby only supports "folder" and "cover." 

 

I was inconsistent about these names, with some "cover.jpg" and some "album.jpg," because Plex accepted either.  Before I found this, naturally, I just spent a few hours renaming all my cover.jpg's to album.jpg.  Ah, well, should be much quicker to put them all back to cover.jpg.

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hexluther

Since we're off topic and this is sort of an appropriate topic talking about Plex to Emby, I have a question:

 

Has Emby noticed any influx in Emby users this past week? I see dozens (perhaps hundreds) of posts in the Plex forums where people are saying they are not satisfied with Plex's latest updates, and going to try Emby... I'm wondering if that was noticeable here at all or are most users in Plex just saying that but not actually following up on it?

Oh I have and much to elan's dismay, I am quite vocal on the subject.  Emby my NOT be exactly what I'm looking for.  However, I've yet to detect any bit of arrogance from Emby's dev's or Emby users in any thread that I've read here.  That in-of-itself is a point for Emby.

 

In fact, I took a screenshot of my Emby Premiere portion of my server and posted it within a post of mine over there.  elan removed it, editing in its place "removed obnoxious picture".

 

Yeah, I'm a dick and.. I'm ok with that.

Edited by hexluther
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beckfield

Thanks for the feedback, I'll add support for album.jpg.

 

Thanks!  I wasn't even thinking of it as a feature request, just a note that contributed to the "migration" topic.  But I'll take it! :)

 

Having changed all my images back to 'cover.jpg' and 'folder.jpg,' it appears that Emby isn't very reliable in picking them up anyway.  It seems to get some, but not others.  Are there perhaps other limitations, like file size or something?

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