Radarr -> Emby -> Emby-next-gen -> Kodi - Sortitle issues.

[zonknz 4]

Hi- i am using the above chain for new movies, and some things are going wrong with sorttitle metadata changes i make in Kodi, being overwritten somewhat randomly - i'm not clear why or how, or how to figure out what is going wrong.

My preference is that i import the sort title from Radarr once only - from the .nfo file that Radarr writes as the movie is discovered.

What is going wrong is in the Emby Collections area- I have a few collections- James Bond, for example, where i want the sort title to be James Bond, so they are displayed in Kodi's movies menu under J, in series order - i don't use or what the collection to appear in movies as a single title / nested collection - i'd prefer just all to be listed in order.

 

I've gone through and added the sort title to be James Bond 1 through James Bond nn in each title for each title. I'm not quite clear what the metadata 'sort title' in the collection achieves, i must admit.

The problem is that some movies seem to be regressing sort title back to the radarr default; i'm not really sure why, or how to prevent it?

Here's the movies settings:

 

 

Edited April 10, 2022 by zonknz

[zonknz 4]

If i had to guess, my assumption is that emby is occasionally re-reading sort title from the .nfo, and overwriting the custom sort title i've put in emby. Just not sure why, and how to prevent this after initial import?

[Luke 42085]

1 hour ago, zonknz said:

If i had to guess, my assumption is that emby is occasionally re-reading sort title from the .nfo, and overwriting the custom sort title i've put in emby. Just not sure why, and how to prevent this after initial import?

Hi, if you enable nfo saving, them Emby will be able to update the nfo file whenever you make changes in the Emby metadata editor.

But yes, if the nfo file changes, it will be rescanned.

[zonknz 4]

Thanks- so on its own, rescanning the library in emby won't force a reload from the nfo? A process is updating the .nfo, and emby is rescanning that?

[Luke 42085]

1 hour ago, zonknz said:

Thanks- so on its own, rescanning the library in emby won't force a reload from the nfo? A process is updating the .nfo, and emby is rescanning that?

If the nfo changes, emby server will realize that on the next library scan and reread the nfo.

[zonknz 4]

So after a couple of days, the nfo is being overwritten; so i am guessing radarr is doing something, and i'm off in that direction trying to figure out why...

[Luke 42085]

Let us know what you find. Thanks.

[zonknz 4]

Ok- so the actually picture here is a bit more complicated. the actual pipeline is of metadata into my media system is:

tmdb -> *arr cache of tmdb -> Radarr -> Emby -> Emby-next-gen -> Kodi.

So what is actually happening is that a (human) metadata editor up in tmdb publishes a change to the metadata. Radarr will do it's daily cache referesh, staging data for all of its users, then eventually my local radarr will do a daily-ish update, looking for upstream metadata changes. Eventually, this means the file in the movie folder will change, because someone added something up in tmdb 24-48 hours earlier!

Now this gets to the crux of the problem- by design, i am guessing that Emby considers the nfo being updated to be re-worthy of a re-scan - and emby is overwriting my custom sorttitle that i had set as an admin user.

So - i guess i would consider this an unintended consequence of the design and integration to other systems!

 

firstly- i am going to work around this with a cron job and using sed or similar to mantain my preferred sort title metadata. Just trying to figure out how to refresh all of the source nfos that have been changed by emby through my manual editing. It also means there is no point saving emby changes back to the nfo.

secondly- Can i ask for a feature request where sorttitles are not re-imported from nfo changes - i.e custom sort title in emby's DB always wins? - unless there is some other way to do this already in emby?

Edited April 13, 2022 by zonknz

[Luke 42085]

Why not just turn off nfo in radarr and let Emby handle it?

[zonknz 4]

Thanks- i suppose by habit i've always had metadata created by some sort of process, before it ends up in emby - so this hadn't really occured to me as an option.

If emby can't identify a movie, how is that handled in the library?

[Luke 42085]

Most of the time it will, because the MovieDb search engine usually returns something, so it's more likely that it would have something incorrect than with nothing. But when nothing is found, you'll just see the file name and a generated image.

[zonknz 4]

Thanks - will try this approach, and report back if any issues.

[Luke 42085]

Let us know how you get on. Thanks.