Date added issue 4.9.1.80

[pgriffith 88]

I've yet to upgrade my installation to 4.9 as I've been too concerned with all the issues people have been having, especially the Date Added issue.

So, I ran up a portable 4.9 side by side 4.8 on a different port. On drives where I had enough space, I copied a substantial amount of my movies to temporary folders and created some new libraries in 4.9.

On my main storage where all new media is added, as I didn't have enough space to copy the entire movie library, after sorting by date, I grabbed a chunk from the most recent additions, then scrolled down and grabbed a chunk from the middle and then a chunk from the end so I had a diverse range of dates. 52 movies in total.

On my secondary storage I had enough space to copy the entire movie folder, this contained 1627 movies.

All my movies contain valid NFO's and all media is saved within the folder. As shown.

I created my new libraries with the EXACT same settings as my live 4.8 system. I added the location that contained the 52 movies and let it do its thing, all movies were imported ok with NONE of the Date Added values changed, which is what we should be expecting.

I then added the location with the 1600 movies and let it import overnight. Unfortunately, the bug reared its head. It imported most of the movies with no issue, correct dates intact. BUT it also changed the Date Added on 106 of them to the date they were scanned into the library.

I noticed that I still had a movie.xml in a lot of the older content and thought possibly that might have been a cause of the issue, but on inspection 1495 movies still contained a movie.xml and only 106 of them had the issue.

I copied all the NFO's in my library beforehand, but I have yet to restore them over the top in case you wanted me to check anything.

The 106 movies that had their Date Added changed are all in perfect alphabetical (I assume it processes from A-Z) order with 2-3 minutes difference in their Date Added values. And they weren't a contiguous block of movies from the total 1600, they range from C to Z. I saw this by sorting by date added in Table view. There was around 4 hours timestamp difference between the newest and oldest of the 106 movies.

I figured this was the best-case scenario to test 4.9 and it failed it anyway, something with this process is clearly broken.

 

Edit: I decided to copy one of the original NFO's back to the newest movie according to Emby. The Data Added in it's NFO now says;

<dateadded>2008-04-16 11:28:24</dateadded>

I have restarted the server twice and performed 2 library scans. Emby is not picking up the NFO change. Looking at the metadata of the movie, it still says

So how do I get Emby to recognise the NFO update now, if I have potentially hundreds of movies that are going to be affected, it seems backing up the NFO files is going to pointless if Emby is not scanning them.

Edited October 8, 2025 by pgriffith
Additional Info

[Luke 42077]

Quote

I have restarted the server twice and performed 2 library scans.

Hi, what exactly did you do? I tested this and it worked just fine. To scan, I selected "Scan library files" on the movie library after editing the nfo file.