Movie Collection Not Showing All Included Movies

[saj 10]

I have a media database on a networked server. I am having a problem with one movie collection, and I have tried everything I can think of to resolve it. Virtual drive letter V is associated with the pool of storage drives. I have 5 movies in a particular collection. If I view the collection via any of the interfaces, only 3 of the movies show up. If I play the collection only those 3 play. The collection IDs are correct in all five. Further if I look at the metadata for the collection, all 5 movies are listed under the collection name. Another oddity is that CoverArt seems to see all the movies in the collection, because I use the stack treatment for collections and it will show up to 4 movies in the stack. I get 4, instead of the 3 I would see if 2 were not recognized.

 

There is something different about the 2 invisible movies within the metadata for the collection. First of all, if I look at the movie metadata for each of the movies in the collection, they all look similarly formatted. In particular, the paths listed for the movies all start with the network server name, as \\server-name\...When I look at the metadata for the collection, all 5 movies are listed properly under it. However, if I look at the individual movie entries under the collection metadata, the 3 that show up have paths in the format \\server-name\... The 2 movies that don't show up have paths in the format V:\... There is one other odd difference I notice. The 2 movies that don't show up have no original title field under the collection metadata. The 3 with network formatted paths do show the original title field. The individual movie metadata for all the movies show the original title field properly.

 

As I said, I have tried everything I can think of the fix this. I can't edit the path metadata, as far as I can tell. I have rebuilt the collection multiple times with both Auto Box Sets and manually. I have deleted the movies and their metadata, completely deleted the emby server cache, reinstalled the movies into the database and let emby rebuild the metadata multiple times. I always get the same result. I have no idea why these 2 entries show the alternate path format. I have not looked at every other metadata entry, but I have looked at a lot, and I don't see any others treated that way.

 

Thanks for your help.

Edited April 16, 2019 by saj

[ebr 14951]

Parental controls...?

[jonomite 29]

FWIW, I recently fixed an issue with a handful of collections not properly showing by deleting my library.db file. Apparently it was corrupt and after that it worked like a charm.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

[saj 10]

No parental controls are enabled.

[Luke 37200]

Can you please go over an example? Thanks.

[saj 10]

Thank you to jonomite. I deleted my library-db file and recreated it. The error is gone. Of course, I have no idea how it became corrupted, but rebuilding fixed it. Maybe that's a good thing to do periodically anyway. Luke, if you still want some more detail, I will be glad to give it, but my original description is complete. All I could add would be the names of the individual movies and the specific collection, but I don' think that would be of value. The question seems to be why the paths for those two movies under the collection heading in the metadata would have been malformed.

[saj 10]

I should note that building a new library-db loses all the watched history. I didn't actually delete the old library-db, of course. I just renamed it. So is there any way to recover the watched data easily?

[saj 10]

Also, it appears that when the server processes a movie whose name starts with an article (A, An or The), the name with the leading article is placed in the sort title metadata field sometimes. I can't see how it decides, but the sort title field is filled in for some such movies and not others. I name my files with the leading article in place, but I don't want to sort them that way in emby. I had earlier removed all those sort title values and have to fix that again, but I wonder if there is an option to prevent that behavior. I don't see one, but I do seem to remember an option for controlling that sort order before.

Edited April 16, 2019 by saj

[ebr 14951]

Also, it appears that when the server processes a movie whose name starts with an article (A, An or The), the name with the leading article is placed in the sort title metadata field sometimes. I can't see how it decides, but the sort title field is filled in for some such movies and not others. I name my files with the leading article in place, but I don't want to sort them that way in emby. I had earlier removed all those sort title values and have to fix that again, but I wonder if there is an option to prevent that behavior. I don't see one, but I do seem to remember an option for controlling that sort order before.

 

Are you sure that you didn't have existing metadata files with the sort titles filled in?

[saj 10]

I had very recently, like within the last two weeks, made sure all my movies were sorting as desired and had cleared any sort titles that were causing a problem, so I am confident there were none showing in emby when I recreated my library-db file. I don't create metadata any other way than with emby. After I let emby recreate the library-db, there were quite a few sort fields filled in, although not all the movies with titles that started with "The" had that treatment.So, I guess the question is, does emby store sort title metadata somewhere that remains after I delete a sort title via the server interface, ignore it until I recreate the library-db file and then pick it back up from there when I recreate the library-db via the scan function.

[Luke 37200]

 

 

does emby store sort title metadata somewhere that remains after I delete a sort title via the server interface

 

Only in metadata files, if you have enabled saving to them.

[Happy2Play 8348]

does emby store sort title metadata somewhere that remains after I delete a sort title via the server interface

 

If it was all done via Emby UI then no, as this should update the nfo file and/or the database.  So if the sort title is persistent after deletion then I would assume there is a write issue somewhere and should be reflected in the server log.

 

As for the userdata that is maintained in the library.db, if you are premiere user then the Server Configuration Backup plugin backs up userdata.  If not the you can attempt to import that table from the old database into the new database.

https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Wiki/wiki/Backup#restore-user-data

Edited April 16, 2019 by Happy2Play

[saj 10]

OK, upon much closer inspection, I think I understand.at least part of my problem. My movie database has been around quite a while and through many iterations of emby (nee mediabrowser). I seem to have some movies with old .nfo files that indeed contain the sort title field. I think those are the source of the sort title problems I have experienced. Apologies, and thanks for your help. I still don't know what happened to cause the strange collection metadata problem, but it was corrected by a library-db rebuild. Now I will embark on some metadata file cleanup in my database to avoid this in the future..Thanks again.

[jonomite 29]

Apologies for the OT post, but it occurs to me that it might be helpful to have some way to scan the library file to detect possible corruption. For me, the only indication there was a problem was the fact that a small, random group of movies would not auto-add to collections. And even that was a random discovery. Aside from that, everything seemed to be working properly.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

[Luke 37200]

@@saj

@@jonomite

 

Thanks for the feedback. Are either of you still having an issue here?

[jonomite 29]

No. The issue seems to have resolved for me after I deleted my library.db file.

 

I guess the only lingering issue is knowing when that file becomes corrupt again. The only indication I had was I happened to notice a few movies wouldn't add to collections.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

[Luke 37200]

Thanks for the feedback.