Are nfo's necessary? For TV shows and episodes.

[clarkss12 304]

I am having issues with the nfo's under Kodi. The nfo's that are created by Emby Will not scrape under Kodi.

My only solution is to disable the nfo creation.

What are the purpose of those, and what impact on Emby if I disable and remove all of the nfo's?

Thanks 

 

 

[Luke 42079]

Hi, the purpose is explained underneath the option where you enable it. Does this help clarify?

[clarkss12 304]

It does NOT tell me the purpose of the nfo.  If I disable it, does it affect the information that shows about each TV episode, like actors, etc?  

These nfo's are creating  havoc with Kodi.  I have been deleting them from my recording files, in order for Kodi to work.  Does that impact the Emby apps under Android?

[ebr 16184]

These save your metadata next to your media.  Advantages:

• Greatly speed up refreshes of metadata
• Greatly speed up library ingestion if items are moved around or even moved to another server
• Allows any custom edits you made to survive things like a server re-installation or move
• Allow other products to share this metadata where possible

[clarkss12 304]

36 minutes ago, ebr said:

These save your metadata next to your media.  Advantages:

• Greatly speed up refreshes of metadata
• Greatly speed up library ingestion if items are moved around or even moved to another server
• Allows any custom edits you made to survive things like a server re-installation or move
• Allow other products to share this metadata where possible

If you are interested, this is why I bring this up.  I guess Kodi made some changes on how they scrape, anyway, those nfo's create havoc on Kodi.  This is our conversation.  He says something about the scrapers that you use are out dated, from what I understand.

  https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=373012

 

 

[Luke 42079]

Why do you think they create havoc?

[clarkss12 304]

44 minutes ago, Luke said:

Why do you think they create havoc?

A few of my recordings that have the nfo files for season and episodes, Kodi can't scrape those episodes, so it shows 0 watched of 0 episodes, so there are no episodes to play.  When I delete all of the nfo's from the shows that cause the issue, then Kodi scrapes those shows perfectly.

[pünktchen 1409]

1 hour ago, Luke said:

Why do you think they create havoc?

The tvshow.nfo generated by Emby is outdated/wrong: <episodeguide> has changed in Kodi to a new format.

In general for all nfo files, not only tv shows, the provider that is used at the time of fetching metadata should be set as default within the provider ids.

[clarkss12 304]

30 minutes ago, pünktchen said:

The tvshow.nfo generated by Emby is outdated/wrong: <episodeguide> has changed in Kodi to a new format.

In general for all nfo files, not only tv shows, the provider that is used at the time of fetching metadata should be set as default within the provider ids.

So, what should I do?

[Luke 42079]

Well that’s an easy change to just make episodeguide a json dump of the providerids. 
 

but geez I can’t believe they would just pull the rug out like that and cause so many compatibility issues.

[Luke 42079]

34 minutes ago, pünktchen said:

The tvshow.nfo generated by Emby is outdated/wrong: <episodeguide> has changed in Kodi to a new format.

In general for all nfo files, not only tv shows, the provider that is used at the time of fetching metadata should be set as default within the provider ids.

Anything else?

[pünktchen 1409]

21 minutes ago, Luke said:

Anything else?

Not that i know.

[Luke 42079]

Just now, pünktchen said:

Not that i know.

Thanks. I just pushed out an update to the nfo plugin. What I also noticed is that we're still reading and writing the old id tags. That's probably something we should look at deprecating, but I don't have a handle on where the other popular nfo tools are with that so I don't want to break compatibility with anything.

[pünktchen 1409]

25 minutes ago, clarkss12 said:

So, what should I do?

For the time beeing, just delete the <episodeguide> tag from all your tvshow.nfo files.

[pünktchen 1409]

1 minute ago, Luke said:

Thanks. I just pushed out an update to the nfo plugin. What I also noticed is that we're still reading and writing the old id tags. That's probably something we should look at deprecating, but I don't have a handle on where the other popular nfo tools are with that so I don't want to break compatibility with anything.

I wouldn't write them anymore. They are deprecated since 3.5 years now. If those other "popular" tools haven't adopted it yet, the are probably EOL.

[clarkss12 304]

40 minutes ago, pünktchen said:

For the time beeing, just delete the <episodeguide> tag from all your tvshow.nfo files.

Are you aware of a Windows app that will do a universal delete of the nfo files??  I think I recall years ago, that I used such an app to delete certain files for a hard drive directory, but memory fails me.  

I have about 270 different shows across 4 or 5 different hard drives.  Would be nice to point a app that one of the directories that contain my TV shows, and tell it to delete all of the nfo files.  

thanks.

Edit: I should have said that those drives are scattered all across my network. 

Edit 2: never mind, I think the windows search will work.  Testing it now.  I typed in "*.nfo"

Edit 3: One networked folder had over 13k nfo files.  Now I will delete them.

Edited May 7, 2023 by clarkss12