Nested Collections?

[Sammy 790]

I am in process of putting together a massive Marvel Cinematic Universe Collection which includes both the Movies and the TV Series in Chronological Order. I am using this list to do it.

As can be seen, some of the series have portions of seasons, such as S01E(01-07) inserted into the timeline.

This isn't the only instance this occurs. What I'd like to do is create a collection including S01E(01-07) and then include this collection as item #16 in the overall timeline so that the Marvel Cinematic Universe Collection doesn't have each individual episode in it creating a huge list. This works fine for shows such as "Agent Carter" which both seasons are in the timeline in chronological order.

Is this possible?

Edited July 30, 2021 by Sammy

[Luke 42083]

Nested collections are not officially supported, no, though some have found tricks to do it.

[MBSki 1114]

I'd like to do that too, but playlists seems to be the only option. It is an awfully long list though. 

[Sammy 790]

2 hours ago, Luke said:

Nested collections are not officially supported, no, though some have found tricks to do it.

Since they're not "officially" supported are you able to share these "tricks" being as you are the machine behind Emby?

2 hours ago, mbarylski said:

I'd like to do that too, but playlists seems to be the only option. It is an awfully long list though. 

Can Playlists be inserted into Collections? BTW, when I think of Playlists I think mostly of Music.. I guess it can be any library though.

[Luke 42083]

1 minute ago, Sammy said:

Since they're not "officially" supported are you able to share these "tricks" being as you are the machine behind Emby?

Can Playlists be inserted into Collections? BTW, when I think of Playlists I think mostly of Music.. I guess it can be any library though.

I think they're hacking it with the api because it's not exposed in the UI.

[Sammy 790]

@Luke

Is this something I should put in as F.R. so it is officially supported?

Is there some discussion on this in the Forum someplace?

[Carlo 4561]

I would suggest an FR if this is something you are interested in.
Do a quick search first to see if it's already a FR.

[rbjtech 5284]

yep - it's reasonably easy to do - but does involve direct database access - the API method no longer works.

If you really want to play - then I can provide the instructions via PM, but PLEASE do on a test instance first .. 

edit - wow, just looked at your link - that is some undertaking !  

All I have done is create an overall Collection with all the other MCU Collections in it .. 

Edited July 30, 2021 by rbjtech

[Sammy 790]

4 hours ago, rbjtech said:

yep - it's reasonably easy to do - but does involve direct database access - the API method no longer works.

If you really want to play - then I can provide the instructions via PM, but PLEASE do on a test instance first .. 

edit - wow, just looked at your link - that is some undertaking !  

All I have done is create an overall Collection with all the other MCU Collections in it .. 

I don't want to bork my db for sure!

Yes, as you can see it is quite the undertaking. My wife and I are just now starting Season 2 of Agent Carter but have already seen a few of the the following movies but nevertheless I have a bit of time to get this sorted.

I'll probably just add individual episodes to the overall collection but that will be a very long list and when new pieces come out I'll need to re-number those already existing to fit them in.. Unless, and now I'm thinking out loud, I allow space between each in the numbered sort order numbering for future expansion.

[Carlo 4561]

Just curious @Sammy but why not use a Playlist for this?

This should be pretty easy with a playlist to put all vids in order and exactly what playlists are for.

[MBSki 1114]

3 minutes ago, Sammy said:

I'll probably just add individual episodes to the overall collection but that will be a very long list and when new pieces come out I'll need to re-number those already existing to fit them in.. Unless, and now I'm thinking out loud, I allow space between each in the numbered sort order numbering for future expansion.

If you're going to add individual episodes anyways, I'd recommend just creating a playlist. A playlist can be edited via notepad so it's very easy to move episodes, seasons, movies, etc around. Just have to rescan the playlist library once you're done editing via notepad.

[Sammy 790]

1 hour ago, mbarylski said:

Just have to rescan the playlist library once you're done editing via notepad.

How to scan a .txt playlist into Emby? I'd like to do that for this and for music.

[MBSki 1114]

16 minutes ago, Sammy said:

How to scan a .txt playlist into Emby? I'd like to do that for this and for music.

What I meant is that you can edit the playlists that you've created in Emby via notepad and then go to your libraries and re-scan your playlist library. So, what I did was create a Marvel playlist with the first few movies. Then I added agent Carter and some of the one-shots. Since they weren't in the exact right chronological order I opened the playlist text file in notepad and cut and paste to move things around. It's a lot easier than dragging things around in the UI especially when you have to deal with all the tv show episodes. After saving the text file, then rescan the playlist library (see screenshot).

That said, music playlists are different. You should be able to take any playlist you have and re-save it as an m3u playlist. M3u playlists get picked up by Emby, and once they're picked up, you can either edit in Emby or edit in notepad. Of course, this assumes that they playlists are using relative paths and the m3us are in your music library directory so it can find all the songs via relative path. 

Hope I explained that ok, but let me know if I didn't. 

 

[rbjtech 5284]

.. so I had a very quick look at this - playlists are not going to be the answer here because they are done on an individual item basis - thus listing an entire season means listing 24 episodes.  Your playlist also does not have a numbered order - so not ideal.  The playlist would have 100's of items...

Nested collections do work - but you still need to create sub collection for the show/season splits to make it work - and even then, you need to create a 'sort' order (numbered according to the list) to make them appear in order.  But you can't actually assign them an alternative display name - so again, you can't recreate the exact list. 

So while I think you could put the collection together, without some emby modifications to maybe 'hide' these temp collections from the main collections list and display the sort order (instead of just sort by the sort order), I don't think the end result would be satisfactory.