How to set up TV series in a Movie folder?

[teekyoo 1]

In MB2 I had two collections named Movies and TV.  On my EHS I had three entry points, one for TV, one for Movies and one for Movies by genre.  I had a select few TV seasons included in my Movies collection with the genre set as Kids so that they would show up in the genre-specific collection to keep everything together and organized when trying to find something for the kids to watch.  MB3 is setting up the select-by-genre collection on it's own now, which is awesome, but the TV shows are not showing up in the Kids genre.  Here is an example of my folder structure:

C:\ >Movies

       >Monsters, Inc.

          mkv file

       >The Incredibles

          mkv file

       >Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987)

          >Season 3

             S03E01.mkv

             ....etc.

     >TV

        >Breaking Bad

           >Season 1

              S01E01.mkv

              ....etc.

 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will show up in my Movies collection, but it's not sorting by genre.  Any suggestions?

 

Thanks

[Cheesegeezer 3104]

Does it actually have any genre tags?

 

Is TMNT actually a series or the movie? Or both?

[teekyoo 1]

It's the TV series.  This is the top folder, it has several Season folders inside it.  The metadata editor gives me the option of adding a genre.  This shows up in my Movies collection right next to the movies, and it can be navigated the same way one would navigate regular TV series through their TV collection.  But, it won't show up in the Kids section when sorted by genre.

 

[RAZ2013 1]

Could it be due to the intital category setup, when you are educating Media Browser 3 as to where your movies are located and what you want the title to be?  The options to select such as movies, mixed, music and so on.

[Koleckai Silvestri 1154]

Couldn't you create a profile for the Kids and add a movie and a television folder to it? Then everything will be picked up properly.

[teekyoo 1]

Couldn't you create a profile for the Kids and add a movie and a television folder to it? Then everything will be picked up properly.

 

I'm thinking I may go this route.  Unfortunately I accidentally let MB3 refresh my metadata before downloading the genre cleaner plug-in, so I'm working on cleaning up my genres now.  When I finish, I'll probably try a couple things to see if I can get it to work, and move everything to a Kids folder if not.  I've been using MCM for my metadata and MB2 just showed everything exactly as it had been set up regardless of whether it was a TV series in the movie folder.  I'd like MB3 to do that, but all of the other advantages so far offset the need to come up with a workaround.

[teekyoo 1]

I wasn't sure what this was referring to, because I set up my server a while ago, but haven't started making adjustments to it until now:

 

Could it be due to the intital category setup, when you are educating Media Browser 3 as to where your movies are located and what you want the title to be?  The options to select such as movies, mixed, music and so on.

 

But I did have my collections set as "Movies" for the Movies collection and "TV" for the TV collection.  I added another Movies collection and chose the type "Mixed Content", and I indexed it by genre in MBC.  This worked and everything showed up as it had in MB2, but then all of my movies were doubled in any of the web-based clients.  So, I deleted my original Movies collection so the only one left was Movies - "Mixed Content".  However, now the select few TV series were removed from the genre again, but are showing up in my TV collection.  The folders that contain them are not mapped to my TV collection on the server.  Any ideas on what's going on with this?  Is there some place I can just define these individually and tell the server where to put them?  I didn't see anything in the metadata screen that seemed like it would do this.

[RAZ2013 1]

Hey teekyoo, I'm betting what happen has something to do with the setup selection per movie database as well as you adding the the third one as mixed content instead of movie content.  I re-read the setup guide and I didn't find these settings mentioned.  Maybe this is something we might want to address, as to what they exactly do.  Being a old dbase user, I know that doubling can occure when you use two querying processes for similar data.

[teekyoo 1]

Yea, I'm pretty sure it's just something that has changed with the new architecture, and it hasn't been added back in.  The TV series in question show up in my Movies media folder on the main page of the web client, but they show up in the TV Shows collection that the Web Client puts together itself.  The Movies by Genre category that is automatically generated by MB3 doesn't include them, but when I indexed my Movies folder by genre, they were there.  I think the system is just set up to automate so many things there's no way to trick it into getting it where you want without it "fixing" it for you.  I think the best work around for me is going to be to add a third collection called Kids and then just take the various movies and TV series scattered over my hard drives and put them all into that folder.  Thanks to those who took a stab at it for me.

[Luke 42077]

I probably need more information, but I will say that we have added so many new features that it makes it hard to allow for these kinds of mish-mash file structures. It's a lot easier if you consider your folder structure as your data, and your media browser apps as your view. Leave the data pristine and the view can do all kinds of things for you. If you muck with the data to massage the view, that's when you run into these kinds of problems.

 

However, in some cases it will work, so more information is needed in order to determine if you're doing something that is supported or not. Some info that might help are windows explorer screenshots of all of the folders in question, screenshots of the media library setup in the dashboard, and screenshots of the symptoms you're seeing in the web client. And full screenshots, unlike post #3, those little cut-outs don't really help us diagnose.

[teekyoo 1]

I probably need more information, but I will say that we have added so many new features that it makes it hard to allow for these kinds of mish-mash file structures. It's a lot easier if you consider your folder structure as your data, and your media browser apps as your view. Leave the data pristine and the view can do all kinds of things for you. If you muck with the data to massage the view, that's when you run into these kinds of problems.

 

However, in some cases it will work, so more information is needed in order to determine if you're doing something that is supported or not. Some info that might help are windows explorer screenshots of all of the folders in question, screenshots of the media library setup in the dashboard, and screenshots of the symptoms you're seeing in the web client. And full screenshots, unlike post #3, those little cut-outs don't really help us diagnose.

 

Thanks, I'll do what I can here, let me know if there is anything specific that would be helpful.  I don't want to shotgun two dozen screen shots at you:

I'll use The Adventures of Chuck and Friends for this one, because it's always closer to the beginning.  Here is the set up in my directory:

 

 

The file structure is simple, four hard drives, each with a Movies folder and a TV folder with movie and TV folders inside.  Except I put a handful of TV shows in the Movie folders so they would be sorted with the movies - The Adventures of Chuck and Friends is in a directory dedicated to movies.  Here is how my server is set up:

 

My web client, notice that Chuck and Friends is peeking out of the pane in the upper right:

 

 

This is a view from my TV Media Folder, Chuck is not there:

 

Here is my Movies Media Folder, showing the series as it exists in my file structure:

 

Yet, if I go into the Movies portion of the Web Client (the upper-left pane):

 

And click on Genres:

 

It's not there.  If I back out to look at Movies in general:

 

Still nothing...The web client has put it into TV.  In MBC it basically does the first half of this - Chuck will show up in Movies where I put it, but it won't show up in a genre sort (although MBC does not put it into TV for me).  In MB2 I had a TV collection, a Movies collection, then a Movies by Genre collection, which was a repeat of the Movies collection, but indexed by genre.  It would show the TV series and movies together in the same genre.  I'm just trying to get that back.  It seems like a pretty minor thing, but I use the Kids genre the most to get to what my son can watch without him seeing the other stuff (Like when he wanted to watch the movie with the snake when he saw the cover for Jason Goes To Hell).  It also increases ease of use for the wife when I'm not around. 

 

I originally had my Movies collection on the server set as "Movies" rather than "Mixed Content".  I had the same problem, except it didn't automatically assign things to TV.  If you need to see the metadata, I'd be happy to take some more screen shots. 

 

Thanks for following up on the thread.

[Luke 42077]

I believe it is working as expected. The folder browsing appears to be working correctly because it is showing the content based on location, and everything appears to be displaying where it should be.

 

The other screens are displayed based on media type. It doesn't matter where you put Chuck, if it's a tv series then it's going to show under tv genres, not movie genres. Those screens ignore folder structure. There is no way to change this unless you try to force Chuck into a movie, and I can promise that's not going to turn out well. The pages with the tabs are entirely data-driven. It doesn't care where you put your files, movies are going to show in the movie area, and tv in the tv area, and so on. That predictability is the reason why those screens have considerably more features. With folder browsing everything has to be treated generically and dumbed down.

[teekyoo 1]

That makes sense, and I think it explains why I was getting different behavior in Classic with the genres set-up than with the others.  I think it reaffirms that to get close to what I'm wanting, I will have to consolidate all of those items into their own Media Folder and add them as an additional entry point on my EHS.  I'm fine with the web client doing its thing, my main concern based on how we use our system was with Classic.  Thanks again for taking a look at that.