What's the right way to organize my media library for my use case?

[Marc_G 95]

Folks,

 

I've been using Media Browser / Emby since 2009. I'm not a novice user, but the software has evolved well beyond what it used to be, and some of the changes apparently require me to reconfigure how I've got my libraries set up, so that the users (in emby for WMC, Emby Theater, or Android apps) will see the content arranged as I wish without extraneous extras / suggestions / or unintended reorganization.  For WMC I've been using legacy browsing mode, and I'm fine with casting it off in favor of learning the right way to do it now.

 

(Mini rant: MB used to do exactly what I want the way I want it, now it doesn't, but I wish there was a way to just tell it I'm a simple user who manually organizes my stuff and that it should just display it exactly the way I organized it, with no suggestions, upcoming TV, or anything else... just show the darned folders!)

 

Here is my current library config:

 

 

When I open up Emby for WMC, or Theater on a windows device, I just want to see media arranged in the five major categories shown above.

 

Within the TV series, things are arranged like:

 

\TV Series\Hannibal\Season 1\

Hannibal S01E01.mkv

Hannibal S01E02.mkv

... and so on

 

And within Movies it's one less layer:

 

\Movies\Kickass\Kickass.mkv

\Movies\The_Maze_Runner\TheMazeRunner.mkv

 

And so on.  Again, with legacy browsing on WMC it has been mostly OK though recently "Upcoming TV" showed up, and on another computer it's showing "Latest" and so on. On my Emby Theater installations I'm seeing all kinds of stuff with suggestions and genres and ... ACK!

 

All I want is for it to show the folders I've given it, arranged exactly the way I've ordered them, with no Genre stuff, no Latest, No suggestions, No upcoming TV, NOTHING other than EXACTLY the order I've arranged things.

 

One semi-deviation is that I have many TV series folders that are currently empty of any seasons of content; These I want to NOT SHOW in the view if they are empty. This used to work fine; recently something changed and my empty folders show. I wait for seasons of TV to come on disc; during these waiting periods there's nothing to watch and I want those programs to not show. In the old days there were settings for this... I want them back, or some way to reproduce the functionality.

 

Please let me know the right way to set this up on the Server side, as well as for WMC and Emby Theater. I've got CoverArt by the way, and I'm currently using an old ROC theme, but I'm willing to switch themes. I like coverflow formats, and ROC had a great one.

 

Thanks in advance for guidance in my reeducation so I can use the configurations properly instead of just raging at the machine! :-)

 

Marc

[Luke 42078]

You should define the libraries for what they are, so if they're TV, use TV, rather than unset. It will make things easier. 

 

Then, explore individual user display settings by clicking the user icon in the top right.

[Marc_G 95]

Thanks Luke. I always appreciate your help.

 

So, the Documentaries are really just TV shows, so I've removed/replaced that Library entry with a new Documentaries with Type set to TV.

 

For my "Holding" library entry, it is a mix of TV shows and movies. It's basically stuff my wife hates and doesn't want to see mixed in with the main Movies and TV folders that we watch together. Since it is a mix of content types, how should I attribute it from a type perspective?

 

Also, the System Tests are just that... a bunch of clips with contrast test screens, color calibrations, subtitle test clips, and the like. I need this to always display in it's own folder, never mixed in with movies or TV shows. So, I've left it as mixed/unset for now.  Is leaving its type unset correct?

 

In my user's Display Settings, I've got none of the three check boxes checked. For Home Screen Settings, Home Page Section 1 is set to My Media. I've unchecked all the automatic grouping stuff in My Views. And unchecked all the items from Latest Items.   Folders are show first in the View Order.

 

I will play around with this for the moment and see how it goes. I'm having an issue where a lot of the pictures aren't displaying in most views, for anything other than my HTPC / WMC with ROC theme. WMC on my desktop is coming up with the content but no thumbnails or posters, and Emby Theater is similarly mostly pictureless. Not sure what's going on, since the metadata are there and do show on my WMC/ROC system. 

 

Later today I will dig more into it; in the meantime my kids have soccer...

[bluemonkey07 590]

The test clips you could set as home videos

[puithove 209]

For my "Holding" library entry, it is a mix of TV shows and movies. It's basically stuff my wife hates and doesn't want to see mixed in with the main Movies and TV folders that we watch together. 

 

*Porn

 

 No judgement here.

[Marc_G 95]

Nah, if it were p0rn I would set that up under a separate account. It's just stuff she's not interested in. Currently only: Space 1999 and Sucker Punch.

 

But when I get "Marc Movies" she often wants me to put them in there.

 

I can set the test clips as home videos to keep them separate I suppose.  I'm messing around with stuff today. Some problems I've had seemed to be that Server was stuck scanning; restarting the server got me past that problem. Now I can actually see pictures of things with my emby for WMC / default theme setup on PC.  My Emby Theater is still showing black screen right now on my windows tablet. Sigh.

[Marc_G 95]

Thanks for all the replies, folks.

 

For the moment things are reasonably stable. A few learnings for the last day or so:

 

1. It seems that whatever made "Upcoming TV" show up on my WMC clients has gone away, much to my delight. Since I manually add TV series episodes, emby would have no way of knowing whats coming to MY TV anytime soon!

 

2. My server was stuck in a scanning pass last night and earlier today; this prevented any of the clients other than WMC from fetching art. Presumably, WMC was working well because it had already loaded and didn't need to fetch posters and such.  Anyway, I exited and restarted the server, then ran a scan that completed successfully, and after that my android and emby Theater clients were able to load art OK.

 

3. Using the settings for the user (display settings, home page settings etc.) I'm directionally headed down a good path. I'm not done yet but I think I'll get there. I still need to look into the "don't show empty folders" issues and a few other things.

 

4. I'm finding Emby Theater (paid version; I'm a lifetime subscriber) to be quite unstable on both my Win 7 desktop and my Win 10 tablet. Even after correcting the server issue above, just playing around, half the time it would glitch and get stuck on a screen or enter a weird loop where it seemed to repeatedly try to reload a list of shows or some such. Which is weird because when it seems to be working, it works fine.

 

5. I'm having trouble with Emby Theater playing on my Win 10 tablet in general... any 1080p shows stutter unwatchably (while on a good wifi connection in my house on my LAN). The Android client works fine in the same location.  I suspect it's the tablet more than anything else... it's one of those cheap $100 Baytrail Flexx 10.1 units I got from Walmart. I will investigate a bit. EDIT: This problem seems due to wireless connectivity speeds between this computer and others in my home. Local media plays fine (no choppiness). It seems to only be able to move files etc. at around 2-4 mbps (versus 60+ for my other computers) so I'm investigating what's going on. I've turned off the Win 10 peer updating thing already so I know that's not it...

 

I only spent an hour or two on this stuff today but learned a lot. Always I appreciate the support from this forum, and the developers of emby!

 

Marc

Edited April 24, 2016 by Marc_G

[CashMoney 94]

Just to be sure here, you're using seperate accounts for yourself and your wife right? A friend of mine is a big big horror/b movie fan and his wife doesn't even want to see the covers let alone the movies themselves. So we store anything that is horror/b movie in a seperate folder categorized as movies, then just uncheck that folder from her account. We do the same for TV shows. This would require seperating your media though which may not be how you want to do it?

 

A bit of manual work, but you could also look into tagging items your wife doesn't want to see; add a tag of "marcs movies" for example and then under her user block display of any items that are tagged "marc's movies". This way you wouldn't need to create seperate folders to store them in, but you would most likely have to tag them manually (unless they all have a common tag/meta item such as genre or rating).

 

https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Wiki/wiki/Parental%20controls#parental-controls-via-tags

and

https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Wiki/wiki/Metadata%20manager#parental-controls-and-metadata

 

That may help you seperate your media ... I think? People look at Parental Controls and naturally think of what they are most commonly used for - Parental Controls. But you can easily adapt them in Emby to work for any group, be it age, genre or anything else you can think of

[Marc_G 95]

^{No, actually we have just one account and it auto-signs in. My wife watches essentially no TV without me; it's not her interest. Basically, we go to the media room, open up WMC/Emby, and all our media is there. What's important is that the media be displayed in the folders as we've assigned them. I don't want to bother with tagging which movies/TV are "mine" and which are "ours" ... I just drop most of them (including ones she might have interest in) into the TV or Movies folder; the separate folder is for things I might watch alone (Game of Thrones! Space 1999! and so on...)}

^{I will play with this some more on Friday when I have a bit of time.}