Why is Emby Creating Virtual Missing Episodes?

[DarWun 349]

Most series folders in my TV show library contain a single folder where recorded episodes for the currently airing season are stored until watched. After doing a fresh install of Emby over the weekend, the progress bar for the initial library scan made it to 97.7% and appeared to stall.  After not moving for about 15minutes, I took a look in the log to see what Emby was doing.  I found over a hundred entries indicating that "virtual missing episodes" were being created. This occurred even with the option to "display missing episodes within seasons" being turned off. In addition to creating virtual episodes, Emby was downloading artwork for the past seasons. Neither the virtual missing episodes or the season artwork show up in the metadata viewer. But the season artwork can be found in the metadata folder.

 

Is this normal?

Edited November 14, 2016 by DarWun

[Happy2Play 9780]

The entire "Upcoming" section are Virtual Missing Episodes, right?  But you would need to post a log to show what the server was doing.

[DarWun 349]

The entire "Upcoming" section are Virtual Missing Episodes, right?  But you would need to post a log to show what the server was doing.

I think the "Upcoming" section is populated with "Virtual Unaired Episodes", not "Virtual Missing Episodes".  I noticed references to both items in the log.  Unfortunately the initial scan was done a couple of days ago, and I've since deleted the log containing the pertinent information.  But I've attached a log created earlier tonight after adding Survivor Season 33 to my library.  As shown in the log, virtual episodes were created for all 32 previous seasons of the show, with season artwork being downloaded for each season.  The tvdb subfolder in the Emby cache contains an xml file with downloaded info for every single episode.  The xml indicates that a thumb was added as well.  But none turned up when I searched for them.  The library scan took 14minutes with close to 60% of that time being spent creating the virtual episodes.

 

server-63614753400.txt

 

On a positive note, Emby seems to delete the virtual season artwork when the associated series is removed from the library.

 

[ebr 16184]

Yes, this is all normal.  We gather the information and then you decide whether or not you wish to view it (by user).