best way to setup Emby using external drives?

[Schiffschaukel 0]

@@marcelveldt from kodiforum/skin Titan pointed me to Emby as I do have some issues within Kodi. But lucky me, Emby should be able to handle exactly my issues. This are my problems within Kodi:

 

I dont have a NAS (as for 25 and growing external disks I am not able or willing to go there). So I am working with external disks as source hosting my movies and tv-shows. Using Ember Media Manager to scrape them correctly. This is just working fine with Kodi. Heres what for e.g. a movie folder looks like:

 

Folder with moviename/folder ".actors", moviename.mkv, moviename.nfo, moviename-fanart.jpg, moviename-poster.jpg, logo.png

 

And now comes the part that troubles me: marcel and a team kodi member told me, that the artwork is stored in Kodis texture cache. But it is only cached for, as they named it, "X days". this means, the artwork of any external drive, which is offline, just goes black after X days.

And this is where Emby should take over. According to marcel Emby should be able to

 

1. handle offline media

2. store artwork (and the nfo, not shure about that) locally on my htpc.

 

If this is working correctly, all information needed should be available all the time.

As I am totally new to Emby, I would be more than glad if any of you could show me the direction in setting up Emby for my purposes.

 

cheers, Schiffschaukel

Edited December 8, 2015 by Schiffschaukel

[marcelveldt 736]

@@ebr or @@Luke can you give some insight if Emby would be able to handle offline media ?

This user has his media collection spreaded over 25+ external disks which is causing issues with Kodi natively.

 

My idea was to have Emby in between to handle the metadata but I'm not 100% sure if this use case (offline media) is supported.

[Logos302 86]

I'm guessing a little here but Emby does support offline support and you could store the images and data NOT with the media, so that it was always available.  If something is offline emby will show it as offline.  I'm not sure if Kodi has an offline icon but if it doesn't I'm sure the guys in the emby kodi plugin are really good at adding/support emby users.  

[Luke 42080]

Yes we support taking your drives offline