catch 22 situation updating movie metadata

[blackcatTN 3]

I wanted to update all the movie metadata as I turned on the option of saving the .nfo in each directory, as that seems like a great idea in you ever need to rebuild a server.    Everything was refreshing fine, and the .nfo files are being written ok.   

But the trouble is that it's been running for over 30 hours.  (server is a desktop, fairly recent intel processor with an average consumer nvidia video card)

I don't mind waiting for it finish but sonarr is adding tv shows and telling Emby but Emby doesn't update the TV library as it's working on the Movie one.

That means that people waiting to watch a tv show can't see it, even though it's been sitting on the server for the last 30 hours. 

Turning on watch directories doesn't seem to help as the watched folders are on network mounts and it doesn't work on those.

The only solution appears to be to stop the movie refresh by stopping the server app, restarting the server app and kicking off a TV refresh.

So now if I restart the movie refresh, it appears to starts at the beginning.   Apparently I would have to let the users go without access to the new TV shows for the next 3 or 4 days at least before the movie refresh finishes, which isn't really an option.

It's like a catch 22.

Any ideas?

[GrimReaper 4740]

Are you Refreshing Metadata>Replace all or Search for missing? You could also Multi-select>Refresh Metadata in batches.

[blackcatTN 3]

27 minutes ago, GrimReaper said:

Are you Refreshing Metadata>Replace all or Search for missing? You could also Multi-select>Refresh Metadata in batches.

Hmm. ok...   If pretty much all movies have to be processed to get Emby to write the .nfo for each one, both options are the same, yes?

As for using multi select manually, that does not seem to be an viable option, see attached image:

Even at 100 movies per batch, that's a lot of clicking and waiting for it to finish and then selecting more and starting the next batch.   That seems like weeks of manual work.

I guess I'll check if "Search for missing" will pick up where it left off for writing nfo files. 

But even If it does, I will still have to kill the emby server every day to get the tv shows to refresh for that day.

[GrimReaper 4740]

With that many items, there's no happy solution. If you're on Windows, you could spin-up portable instance and put it to work - select Metadata savers>NFO on library creation and NFOs will be written on ingestion. It'll still take few days, tho, but at least your main server will remain free to import new TV show episodes. 

Edit: Note that you'd lose all custom edits in that scenario (at least those that have not already been written to NFOs by previous refreshes). 

Edited May 19, 2025 by GrimReaper
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[Luke 42078]

I wouldn’t do that. I personally would do the metadata refreshes overnight at an off hour.

 The other option is to just do nothing and then nfo files will get created over time as metadata is saved.

[GrimReaper 4740]

6 minutes ago, Luke said:

I wouldn’t do that. I personally would do the metadata refreshes overnight at an off hour.

 The other option is to just do nothing and then nfo files will get created over time as metadata is saved.

I would assume you haven't really paid attention to that library size: 54,000+ items. 

Off-hours overnight refresh would do but a portion of it. And left to themselves, it'd likely take a year or two to get them all refreshed by the system - if ever. 

[blackcatTN 3]

9 minutes ago, GrimReaper said:

I would assume you haven't really paid attention to that library size: 54,000+ items. 

Off-hours overnight refresh would do but a portion of it. And left to themselves, it'd likely take a year or two to get them all refreshed by the system - if ever. 

That is the core issue I am trying to address with this effort.

The movie library contains multiple mounts and if I could just start a scan on a mount at a time, it might have a chance.

I am not sure why Emby couldn't update the TV library for a quick update/add while the longer Movie library update was in process. 

It's working on a different library so updating that one in parallel doesn't seem to be high risk to the DB.

[GrimReaper 4740]

3 minutes ago, blackcatTN said:

The movie library contains multiple mounts and if I could just start a scan on a mount at a time, it might have a chance.

Are those mounts visible separately in Folders view or are they flattened?