What causes a folder to be treated as a season in mixed content libraries?

[podonnell 47]

47 minutes ago, Luke said:

In mixed content it's either going to be a movie or series. There are no plain videos in mixed content.  So you need to follow movie naming conventions for the things that you want to be movies and tv  naming conventions for the things that you want to be series.

Yes, this is precisely what I kept saying above -- in Mixed Library it's going to be one or the other. So I was questioning if this library type works for this use-case. But then the issue is if any other library type would allow for "next up" which comes with the TV Series style.

I could try and see how the individual items would look as movies. Does that specifically mean placing every item in its own folder, or is <any name here>(1992).mp4  the key thing?

[Luke 42077]

A movies library does not require movies to be in their own folder, but for mixed content it's pretty much a must. You need to help the server determine the difference between something that is a movie and something that is an episode.  You do that by following file naming guidelines.

[podonnell 47]

56 minutes ago, Luke said:

A movies library does not require movies to be in their own folder, but for mixed content it's pretty much a must. You need to help the server determine the difference between something that is a movie and something that is an episode.  You do that by following file naming guidelines.

I've now put every item into its own folder within my "Trailers & Cinematics" folder. The "Trailers & Cinematics" folder itself is still being identified as a series, making all content within be assigned a season named after the title of the file.

Then as I looking through, I see a tvshow.nfo file being created inside "Trailers & Cinematics" -- deleting this seemed to have cleared up the forcing of all this content to be part of a series. Not sure what created that in the first place, but that's a key detail that I think will help to prevent this happening.

Going to try and move some content around and see if this sticks.

Edited July 31, 2025 by podonnell

[pwhodges 2012]

17 minutes ago, podonnell said:

I've now put every item into its own folder within my "Trailers & Cinematics" folder.

Emby typically does not like more levels of folder than are specified in the naming guidelines, and I would not be confident that such an arrangement would be stable.  

Next Up is inherently a series concept.  If you want Next Up to work, just name and arrange your files like a series.  Because it's not a real series, turn off all the metadata providers for that library, and Emby will just use the file names (I think - but just try it and see).  You might also experiment with using folder view to see the folder structure you've actually created.

Paul

[podonnell 47]

The next up stuff is working well for the stuff I have named accordingly.

I think the deletion of the tvshow.nfo was key here for making these fall back to 'movies'.
It would be nice to right click on a folder and remove the identification of a tv series -- essentially deleting that tvshow.nfo file. Having to manually find and delete that did not feel great.

So far it is stable so I will keep adding a few items and make sure this sticks.

This allows me to have a folder with loose files that aren't set as a series, and folders that I then use TV Series naming that do mark as series -- as desired.