New to Emby, have question about pictures for TV episodes

[FrederickWilt 1]

I'm new to Emby and trying to solve some problems. On my Synology NAS unit, where I store all of my media files, I already had Plex installed. I then installed Emby. Both are basically working fine.

I don't know what the correct term is for these pictures found to represent each TV episode, so searching for answers has been a failure.

These are from a old TV show called Bat Masterson. I ripped each episode from the DVDs into MP4 files and placed all of them in an appropriate folder under the top level Movie folder.

Plex found these images below and each seems to match up with the episode.

Doing the same with Emby resulted in several missing images and several duplicate images.

Any thoughts on what I am doing wrong that is causing Emby problems?

[Abobader 3464]

Hello FrederickWilt,

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[seanbuff 1318]

22 minutes ago, FrederickWilt said:

These are from a old TV show called Bat Masterson. I ripped each episode from the DVDs into MP4 files and placed all of them in an appropriate folder under the top level Movie folder.

You mention TV Show, but then have placed them under a Movie top level folder?

Movies and TV Shows are treated differently in Emby, and can have different metadata sources (for the most part)

Please see: TV Naming for the most optimal way of structuring your TV Shows to ensure they retrieve accurate metadata/thumbnails.

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

You said you were placing the episodes in a "movie" folder. That simply is wrong. You need a TV library. The basic structure for a TV library is:
 

TV Shows <- The TV library points here (it should be a TV shows library type)
____________Season 01
__________________ShowName (year) - s01e01 - Optional Name.ext
__________________ShowName (year) - s01e02 - Optional Name.ext
__________________and so on for the shows in season 01
____________Season 02 <- just like Season 01
____________Season 03 <- and so on for each season

____________Season 00 <- or “Specials”
__________________ShowName (year) - s00e01 - Optional name
__________________ShowName (year) - s00e02 - Optional name
__________________and so on for each special

Note: the eXX part of the specials must match EXACTLY what is found in TheTVDB if you want good metadata.

You can try other setups BUT Emby is very picky about TV show structure and it is best not to fight the Great and Powerful Wizard of "EMBY".
 

[FrederickWilt 1]

Sorry it's late here and I entered the wrong word there. It is in a folder TV Shows with the appropriate settings for TV Shows.

Plex is happy with just a simple "s##e##.mp4" file name and accepts multiple seasons and episodes in one folder. It locates episode names, pictures, etc.

Emby won't like that?

OK, I will try the "formal" way and see if it makes a difference. Is the year information really needed? Finding that will be a bit of work.

Seems like Emby is requiring me to do some of the work it should be able to do.

Thanks much.

[guunter 49]

55 minutes ago, FrederickWilt said:

Sorry it's late here and I entered the wrong word there. It is in a folder TV Shows with the appropriate settings for TV Shows.

Plex is happy with just a simple "s##e##.mp4" file name and accepts multiple seasons and episodes in one folder. It locates episode names, pictures, etc.

Emby won't like that?

OK, I will try the "formal" way and see if it makes a difference. Is the year information really needed? Finding that will be a bit of work.

Seems like Emby is requiring me to do some of the work it should be able to do.

Thanks much.

I found the best results for those images is to only use tvdb as the source for the library settings

Edited October 31, 2024 by guunter

[pwhodges 2012]

6 hours ago, FrederickWilt said:

Plex is happy with just a simple "s##e##.mp4" file name and accepts multiple seasons and episodes in one folder. It locates episode names, pictures, etc.
Emby won't like that?

I would expect Emby to handle that OK, actually.  So long as you are seeing the episodes listed in seasons as they should be, I don't believe the layout will affect the fetching of images.  Like others, I would use TVDB as the main metadata source for series, but I retain the alternatives, because Emby uses them to try to fill gaps in the main source's info.

Have you looked at TVDB directly to check whether it has the episode images you are expecting?

Paul

[FrederickWilt 1]

I found the problem.

I had grab an old DVD set (5 discs) to rip, to see how Emby handled a TV show from the '50s. I failed to verify the number of episodes on each disk and trusted the ripper to work as expected.

For reasons I do not understand, the ripper was producing two seemingly identical MP4 files for each actual episode but with different episode numbers. As a result the episode numbers were a mess.

Once I realized what the ripper was doing I re-ripped the discs ensuring only one of each episode was ripped and was assigned the correct episode number.

Now Emby worked just fine, accepting file names of just "show-name sXXeXX.mp4" and correctly locating the episode name, images, etc.

Note to self: Don't assume the ripper gets it right every time.

Thanks to all.

Frederick