Library for YouTube channels

[nino12 2]

Version: 4.8.8.0

Hello everyone,
I'm trying to create a library for downloaded YouTube channels for the last two weeks, but so far, nothing is working flawlessly and currently I'm out of ideas.

First, some information about the overall setup and idea how to do that: I want to keep the overall structure and organize all videos from a specific channel together so they don't mix with videos from other channels. My current approach is to go with a TV show library; A channel in YT is a TV show in Emby, a video in YT is an episode in Emby. I also like to have the ability to see how old an episode is, so I like to go with the date numbering (2024-09-04) instead the seasons and episodes numbering (S01E01). It seems like Emby needs a year information for every TV show, it seems it doesn't work without it. So I'll go with 2005 as year for every TV show (because YouTube is online since 2005 according to Wikipedia). The filename formatting looks like the following at the moment: "tv_show (2005) - yyyy-mm-dd - title - version.ext"

The first problem I encountered was that some substrings of the title section in the filename tempts Emby to fallback to the seasons and episodes numbering. For example, videos about the E3 expo are detected as S01E03 instead. Once I removed the problematic substrings from the title, the video is detected correctly. Since I want to make whole process fully automatic, a solution for this problem would be great.

The second problem is I like to have each video with multiple video codecs (AVC1, AV1 and VP9) and audio codecs (Opus and m4a). While multiple audio codecs works without any issues, for now I didn't found a solution for multiple video codecs. My first approach was to just write all video stream along with all audio streams in one MKV file. Turned out, Emby doesn't support multiple video streams in one file (Someone already wrote a feature request like 10 years ago, but it seems that it has been ignored ever since.). So, I tried to create a separate file for each video codec instead and put the codec information as version in the filename. If I put the files directly into the tv show folder, Emby creates an episode entry with identical metadata for each file instead of merging them to one episode. If I create a subfolder for each episode (folder name formatting is "tv_show (2005) - yyyy-mm-dd - title") and put all version files in it, it even get's weirder. In that case, Emby is creating a seperate tv show with identical names for every single episode. I tried with multiple channels, version formatting, replacing video title with video id etc., but the behavior is always the same. Multiple versions are working fine with "real" tv shows, so I have no clue what's going on here. Merging the episodes to one episode doesn't work as well; the episode that remains after the merge still has only one version and the others just disappeared.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Cheers,
Nino12

[Luke 42077]

Quote

The first problem I encountered was that some substrings of the title section in the filename tempts Emby to fallback to the seasons and episodes numbering. For example, videos about the E3 expo are detected as S01E03 instead. Once I removed the problematic substrings from the title, the video is detected correctly. Since I want to make whole process fully automatic, a solution for this problem would be great.

Hi, can you please provide a specific example of file names? Thanks !

[Happy2Play 9780]

Really depends on the view you are looking for as none of these will likely have metadata provider so Home video and Photo would probably be the best library type.

[nino12 2]

7 minutes ago, Luke said:

Hi, can you please provide a specific example of file names? Thanks !

Of course. For the first problem I can provide an example right away:
"Game Two (2005)/Game Two (2005) - 2019-06-15 - E3-Roundup 2019 XXL： die geilsten Games der Mega-Messe! ｜ Game Two #119.mkv"

[Happy2Play 9780]

Emby is going to chock on the pipe in the file name per another topic.

 

[nino12 2]

3 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

Really depends on the view you are looking for as none of these will likely have metadata provider so Home video and Photo would probably be the best library type.

I turned off all metadata providers because the file itself has all the metadata needed. I tried Home video and Photo before, but my experience is there's almost no structuring possible and therefore it's almost impossible to find stuff once the library is getting larger, so it doesn't suit my needs. There's also no documentation for this library type, so it's completely unclear to me how things work.

[Happy2Play 9780]

Luke will have to comment further as the parser is going to have a heyday with the naming scheme per specific content type libraries.

 

[Luke 42077]

Yea that has nothing to do with metadata providers and is based on how the core server determines episode numbers from file names. Your example there is just a tough corner case.

[nino12 2]

I tried it with three files now and removed every pipe character before moving these files into the library. The issue remains, no change in behavior.

Game Two (2005)/Game Two (2005) - 2019-06-15 - E3-Roundup 2019 XXL die geilsten Games der Mega-Messe! Game Two #119.mkv  ->  S01E03
Game Two (2005)/Game Two (2005) - 2019-06-17 - E3 2019 Tops, Flops & ein unglaublicher Aufreger Montalk #38.mkv  ->  S17E03
Game Two (2005)/Game Two (2005) - 2019-06-12 - 30 Sekunden über unsere persönlichen Highlights der E3.mkv ->  S15E03

What I also noticed: The library was named ‘Game Two (2005) - 2019-06’ by Emby.

Edited September 4, 2024 by nino12

[Happy2Play 9780]

Yes from a TV standpoint Emby is trying to interpret a Season and an episode number.  You can put in Year folders to repesent seasons but will still parse an episode number.  In the end It will be a lot of work manual correcting/generating correct metadata for these items in a tv content type library.

53 minutes ago, nino12 said:

I tried Home video and Photo before, but my experience is there's almost no structuring possible and therefore it's almost impossible to find stuff once the library is getting larger, so it doesn't suit my needs. There's also no documentation for this library type, so it's completely unclear to me how things work.

Should present media as is and sorted per folder option.  As it is not dependent on Season/Episode number like TV is.

 

 

But @Lukedoes that not mean By date naming scheme is broke as episode title is being parsed?  Or is it only supported with no title naming?   

But either way their is no online info to cross reference with so Emby is still guessing here with no Season folder or actual episode numbers.

 

[Luke 42077]

4 hours ago, Happy2Play said:

But @Lukedoes that not mean By date naming scheme is broke as episode title is being parsed?  Or is it only supported with no title naming?   

But either way their is no online info to cross reference with so Emby is still guessing here with no Season folder or actual episode numbers.

 

No, it means that E3 was matched and therefore date parsing was not used. The E3 matching should probably be a little more strict, but obviously, this is just a tough edge case.

[nino12 2]

I don't want to argue, but if that's already a "tough edge case", you might want to review the parsing. After all, everything is clearly separated, the date is even in ISO format, and imho I also adhere to the documented naming guidelines in all other aspects.

I'm switching now to video ids as titles in the filenames and prefer embedded titles over file names in library advanced settings. I'll come back to you once I can tell how well that's working.

Suggestion: Perhaps it would be a good idea to simply add an additional text field in the advanced library settings where it is possible to specify how the parser should parse the file names in the library (RegEx etc.). Then the parser would no longer need to guess in such cases.

[rbjtech 5284]

Do the YT libraries have associated playlists - if yes, then use the playlist to structure the files using a 'TV Series' library type. 

[nino12 2]

1 hour ago, rbjtech said:

Do the YT libraries have associated playlists - if yes, then use the playlist to structure the files using a 'TV Series' library type. 

Yes, technically speaking, a YT channel is nothing but a playlist as well. The problem with that is, the latest video in a channel has playlist index 1. As soon as the uploader publishes a new video, the formerly lastest video then has index 2. This means that every time a new video is added, I would have to rename all existing videos and the corresponding supporting files beforehand.

In addition to this problem, the videos would then also be in the wrong order (newest to oldest, not the other way round as usual).

[nino12 2]

Let's take a radical approach: Is it possible to disable the filename parser for a library completely and write all necessary metadata into a corresponding support file which then will be used by Emby to structure the videos?

[ebr 16169]

2 hours ago, nino12 said:

Let's take a radical approach: Is it possible to disable the filename parser for a library completely and write all necessary metadata into a corresponding support file which then will be used by Emby to structure the videos?

Hi. It is possible to disable metadata providers and read information from tags in the file.  However, your issue is with identification, not metadata.  Before we can go look for metadata, we have to determine what the file is (movie, TV episode, video, song, etc.).  That is what the name parsing (plus some context from the library setup) does.

[nino12 2]

14 minutes ago, ebr said:

Hi. It is possible to disable metadata providers and read information from tags in the file.  However, your issue is with identification, not metadata.  Before we can go look for metadata, we have to determine what the file is (movie, TV episode, video, song, etc.).  That is what the name parsing (plus some context from the library setup) does.

Please read my comment again. I was talking about the filename parser, not metadata providers.

[ebr 16169]

Hi.  Okay, no, it is not possible to do that at this time.  I believe there is an open FR for some sort of customizable parsing.  However, that is something that so few of our users would (properly) utilize or need to utilize that it is not something we are focused on at this time.

[nino12 2]

I see. This situation is very unfortunate. You are completely dependent on a software component that demonstrably has one or more bugs that will not be fixed and that cannot be influenced or bypassed from the outside in any way. So I only have the option of either accepting that the parser messes things up, even though what I want to do is supported according to the documentation, or ditching Emby completely and replacing it with something else.

[Happy2Play 9780]

It is possible but for a TV Show/Series you will be required to have season/episode numbers as a date is not enough.  So from this media standpoint one would be manually creating all metadata and potentially locking it.

But that is pretty standard for all non-online provider data.

[nino12 2]

Ok, "ditching Emby completely and replacing it with something else" it is.

If you don't want to fix your software, at least remove claims from your documentation that are verifiably incorrect. Documentation should stick to the truth and not be misused as an advertising platform.

[Happy2Play 9780]

Well technically documantion is correct but that format is use to match online provider data to get corresponding Season/Episode number for the content.

I guess documentation should state if there in no online provider data you will be limited to a specific naming scheme.  But that is the Devs call.

[Happy2Play 9780]

But in the end I do agree as it would appear the parser is getting worse trying to accommodate all the garbage users have in the naming schemes and should strictly enforce naming schemes per the KB.

But even in this case since there are no season/episode info it would fail unless manually provided.

[softworkz 5066]

It would be possible to work around this by creating a custom metadata provider which fixes season and episode numbers.

[nino12 2]

2 hours ago, softworkz said:

It would be possible to work around this by creating a custom metadata provider which fixes season and episode numbers.

There's a saying in Germany: "If that's the solution, I want my problem back"

I'm certainly not going to write my own metadata provider because nobody cares that the parser is buggy. I'd rather get rid of Emby and find a proper software to replace it.