Need Creative Help with Collections

[MarcusJ 18]

I have two Emby Servers running separately. One is for my home, another is a new server for a friend that I'm helping to build his media center. Both servers are completely up to date, running 4.6.4.0, and will have identical media. However, my Home Emby Server has hundreds of Collections, all of which I have built manually over the years. Many of these are unique collections that could never be reproduced automatically, as they use subjective criteria to assemble them that can't be automated. I really want to get these collections copied to the new server.

The complexity here is that the home server has the media stored on a NAS, and the new server has the exact same media stored on its local drives. So, while the media and its metadata are identical, the paths to the media are different. 

i store all the metadata and NFO files in the media folders, so when I copied all the media from the NAS to the new server's drives, everything that would be logically required was included.

In the past, I could use a good text editor to make mass changes to the many xml files in the data=>collections folder to change the paths of the member movies from the NAS path to the correct drive path location of each movie. With the latest emby release and the elimination of XML files, I no longer understand how the server knows who the members of collections are or where within my folder structures those member movies are located. There would not be common TMDB Collection id's in many of these collections, as the movies aren't always assembled into collections based on traditional criteria for associating the films.

FWIW, I have already run the punktchen migration plugin to migrate my home server to the new folder structure.

In simple terms, i just want to copy my collections from one server to another, without ANY server help assembling the collections. I've already done all the assembling that I want done, and I just want to copy those manually created collections from one emby server to another (with no new collections).

Can anyone help me with the steps I should follow to achieve this?

Like I usually point out, I am not a developer, just a user, so if you're kind enough to reply, please don't assume I will understand technical or cryptic responses. Simple, plain English directions are the only thing my non-tech brain can understand.

Edited September 18, 2021 by MarcusJ

[Carlo 4561]

Hi, you shouldn't need to edit any xml files in 4.6.4 if you have NFO files.

The NFO files should have the collection ID written in the NFO file written similar to this <set>collection name</set>.

If you have NFO reader enabled for the libraries and have import collections turned on the collections should be built for you.

[MarcusJ 18]

Thank you Cayars!

Does it matter that I copied all the media from the NAS to the local drives BEFORE I ran the migration plugin tool? In other words, does running that migration tool change the actual contents of the nfo files such that I would need to re-copy all the files from the NAS to the local drives?

[Carlo 4561]

I'm not sure what migration tool you're referring to?

We have migration instructions for going from DSM 6 to 7 but it's a manual process and not a tool or plugin.  We also aren't moving/copying any content with that migration.

If you're talking about this plugin I'm not sure how that works as it's not an Emby plugin.

 

[MarcusJ 18]

Yes, it is that punktchen migration tool.

Edited September 18, 2021 by MarcusJ

[Carlo 4561]

I don't think that's going to change anything regarding collections.

[pünktchen 1409]

2 hours ago, MarcusJ said:

Thank you Cayars!

Does it matter that I copied all the media from the NAS to the local drives BEFORE I ran the migration plugin tool? In other words, does running that migration tool change the actual contents of the nfo files such that I would need to re-copy all the files from the NAS to the local drives?

Yes it can matter. The migration plugin will not only write nfo files under metadata\collections based on the old data\collection xml files, it will also write <set> tags to the media nfo files if they are missing at the time of the migration process.

[MarcusJ 18]

Thank you, Punktchen!

[Carlo 4561]

13 hours ago, pünktchen said:

Yes it can matter. The migration plugin will not only write nfo files under metadata\collections based on the old data\collection xml files, it will also write <set> tags to the media nfo files if they are missing at the time of the migration process.

Good info, thanks.