Empty Genres

[geowill76 8]

Hi

Since upgrading to the latest Emby Server software I am seeing a view empty genres in my Movies and TV Shows.  I have no idea whereby is getting that information from as I have went through all my Movies and TV Shows and none of them have the genre in them which matches up to the empty genre.  How do I clear the empty genres?

[GrimReaper 4739]

3 hours ago, geowill76 said:

I am seeing a view empty genres in my Movies and TV Shows.  I have no idea whereby is getting that information from

Likely your episodes embedded genres. 

 

3 hours ago, geowill76 said:

How do I clear the empty genres?

Remove those embedded genres with the tool of your choice. 

 

[geowill76 8]

Hi GrimReaper

Thanks for the info.  How do I find out which episodes and movies that have the embedded genre that are causing the problem

[GrimReaper 4739]

3 hours ago, geowill76 said:

How do I find out which episodes and movies that have the embedded genre that are causing the problem

Press Play on genre?

[geowill76 8]

Tried to do that and get the following error on some of the empty genres

Playback Error
No playable items were found. Are you trying to play an empty folder?

On the empty genres that do play content, what is best way to remove the embedded tag?

Will this issue be fixed in a new update for emby server?

 

 

[GrimReaper 4739]

3 hours ago, geowill76 said:

what is best way to remove the embedded tag?

Edit Metadata for that item; use Ai to create a tool that'll go recursively through your folders and remove specific genres; write an ffmpeg bash script to do the same. 

[geowill76 8]

Hi GrimReaper

Did what you said about using AI to create a tool, which created a script to run ffprobe to run through folders and remove genres but hasn't helped.

I still have empty genre folders that display the playback error as no playable items found.

For empty genre folder, that when I press play it starts playing certain TV episodes, I even ran ffprobe on the individual file to see if there were any embedded genre tags and the file is clean so not sure why Emby has created empty genre folders with no playable items or even why where I press play on an empty genre folder it is playing content that doesn't have embedded tag.

Is there anything else I can do?  This problem only started happening now after upgrading Emby server from 4.8 to 4.9.  Is this a known bug?

 

[rdf52 5]

Here is yet another example where the option to use or ignore enbedded metadata needs to be added to the library settings.

[geowill76 8]

I have been able to sort out issue with For empty genre folder, that when I press play it starts playing certain TV episodes.  Not sure how it happened but Emby added the Genres onto my TV episodes matching up to genres with empty folder.

The only issue I have are empty genre folders that show nothing and when I click to play what's in the folder I get error message

Playback Error
No playable items were found. Are you trying to play an empty folder?

How do I remove those genre folders that have no content in them and when you press play get the Playback Error message

 

[Happy2Play 9780]

4 hours ago, geowill76 said:

I have been able to sort out issue with For empty genre folder, that when I press play it starts playing certain TV episodes.  Not sure how it happened but Emby added the Genres onto my TV episodes matching up to genres with empty folder.

The only issue I have are empty genre folders that show nothing and when I click to play what's in the folder I get error message

Playback Error
No playable items were found. Are you trying to play an empty folder?

How do I remove those genre folders that have no content in them and when you press play get the Playback Error message

 

I never hit play, I initially looked in the database to identify at least on example.

First went to mediasitems table and the name column and filtered that specific genre name to get the id

You can't just delete that genre as it has linked items

then put that id into the itemslinkeds table in the linkedid column to see all the items linked to that genre.

then took one of those id back to the mediaitems table and filtered that id to see what media it was and when to that content and use a tool to look at embedded metadata.

Stripped all embedded metadata form all the files linked to said genre and did full library scan for Emby to clear the db.

 

[Lighthammer 91]

I'm glad this topic was floated at the top. I thought I was having a much more severe problem.

Here's the solution to not burry it too deep:
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk%3D_33414f8d-a2ba-48f6-bd05-832f291f8f1e

#1.) Download exiftool
https://exiftool.org

#2.) Run the following command in Powershell, elevated in your root media directory:
exiftool -r -overwrite_original -Genre="" /path/to/TV/subfolders
(recursive -r; clears Genre tag; test on copy first).

---

I was actually hella scared I had a weird caching problem. I use Stablebit on my server:
https://stablebit.com

IMHO, its been a far better tool then classic raids for my usecase(s), and I think its probably the best way to manage your drives in a non-enterprise setup.

Unlike normal raids, virtually all file recovery tools work in this format. You don't have to worry about weird situations where one drive goes and kills your entire raid and you're stuck playing recovery games trying to yank out the drive from the raid, make the raid work, and then figure out how/if you can recover any lost data. There's also not the SEEEEEEEEEERIOUS overhead in setting up the read and letting whatever hardware/software solution you use run a process for a few hours (or days) to set up the raid in the first place.

I had JUST moved installed my second 20 TB HDD and my server was down to about 2 TBs free before hand. I reshuffled a TOOOOOOOOOON of data around via Stablebit and was scared traces were somehow being seen by Emby. While Stablebit is awesome at making everything look pretty on the user/software facing side, it also has a bad habit of leaving "junk" behind on the old drive, especially when you do MASSIVE data moves (most typically, empty directories or even NFOs; though I think this is somewhat intentional, I can't tell you how many times thats been helpful in figured WTF was going on).

---

ANYWAY, Sidetracking a ton, I thought I was going to need to deal with that issue, and I don't think this community has a lot of knowledge on Stablebit. I figured I'd toss that out almost entirely because its a tool I think both the Emby/Plex/Jellyfin community should strongly consider using.

Yea; sorry for the rambling. Thanks for the infos.

[Luke 42077]

Hi, we are looking into this. Thanks.

[zisterzienser 3]

hi, same problem here

 

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

On 10/10/2025 at 11:36 PM, Lighthammer said:

I'm glad this topic was floated at the top. I thought I was having a much more severe problem.

Here's the solution to not burry it too deep:
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk%3D_33414f8d-a2ba-48f6-bd05-832f291f8f1e

#1.) Download exiftool
https://exiftool.org

#2.) Run the following command in Powershell, elevated in your root media directory:
exiftool -r -overwrite_original -Genre="" /path/to/TV/subfolders
(recursive -r; clears Genre tag; test on copy first).

---

I was actually hella scared I had a weird caching problem. I use Stablebit on my server:
https://stablebit.com

IMHO, its been a far better tool then classic raids for my usecase(s), and I think its probably the best way to manage your drives in a non-enterprise setup.

Unlike normal raids, virtually all file recovery tools work in this format. You don't have to worry about weird situations where one drive goes and kills your entire raid and you're stuck playing recovery games trying to yank out the drive from the raid, make the raid work, and then figure out how/if you can recover any lost data. There's also not the SEEEEEEEEEERIOUS overhead in setting up the read and letting whatever hardware/software solution you use run a process for a few hours (or days) to set up the raid in the first place.

I had JUST moved installed my second 20 TB HDD and my server was down to about 2 TBs free before hand. I reshuffled a TOOOOOOOOOON of data around via Stablebit and was scared traces were somehow being seen by Emby. While Stablebit is awesome at making everything look pretty on the user/software facing side, it also has a bad habit of leaving "junk" behind on the old drive, especially when you do MASSIVE data moves (most typically, empty directories or even NFOs; though I think this is somewhat intentional, I can't tell you how many times thats been helpful in figured WTF was going on).

---

ANYWAY, Sidetracking a ton, I thought I was going to need to deal with that issue, and I don't think this community has a lot of knowledge on Stablebit. I figured I'd toss that out almost entirely because its a tool I think both the Emby/Plex/Jellyfin community should strongly consider using.

Yea; sorry for the rambling. Thanks for the infos.

FWIW: I, and many others, use DrivePool to provide expanded storage without a lot of overhead or expense. I have 13 hard drives (ranging in size from 4tb to 12tb) in my pool and may need to add another 10 -12tb in the near future. 
I am unable to be in extended conversations due to health but I thought I would add this to assure you that you are not alone at all in using StableBit products. So asking a specific question will probably get you answers. However i have never had a problem with DrivePool leaving anything behind but I do not try to micro manage DrivePool's job and I just leave everything where DrivePool  puts it. 

DrivePool makes a hugs hard drive that is all under a single letter and I use that drive as the basis for all my Emby media related files. (But note that the Emby database and other dynamic Emby files cannot be stored in the pool or you get bad errors) I just install Emby on my root hard drive that is NOT part of the pool and everything else goes in the pool. I also store all metadata with the media files. 

I hope you have as good an experience with DrivePool as i do. 

[Smitty018210 143]

I wonder if this is similar to the issues I reported months ago about network tab having entries that didn't exist too. 

 

[Luke 42077]

1 hour ago, Smitty018210 said:

I wonder if this is similar to the issues I reported months ago about network tab having entries that didn't exist too. 

 

Yes it is the same thing that we are still looking at. Thanks.

[tmb4016 93]

When did this creep in... My main server was running beta and never saw any of this behaviour. Switched main server to stable and this now appears. It completely screws up the TV library which has been carefully managed 'the old' way and is effecting Genres, Networks and Tags ... To my knowledge there has never been any explanation of where emby is reading the data from in the media and some of it seems completely illogical... Some Networks seem to being read from Copywright property. You should at least let people know which tags to clean to prevent this type of screw up.

What makes it worse is the apparent lack of urgency on the dev side to address the issue which is in a stable version - Looks like an investigation into alternate programs is on the horizon again. Unbelievable.