Method for Improving Extras/Special Features Discoverability and Presentation

[roaku 842]

A while back, I requested that special features under movies be enhanced to give each supported extras folder name its own listing.

But, since it looks like further extras development is a very long way off or never going to happen, I spent some time to come up with a workable solution for my needs.

My goal was to make the best special features, like documentaries, easily discoverable without losing access to less watchable things like deleted scenes or concept art.

My requirements were:

1) Only use officially supported Emby features so I can avoid any future headaches
2) All special features for a movie should continue to exist under that movie
3) Ability to group sets of special features by associated movie or their own siblings (ex. LOTR Appendices).
4) Don't duplicate video files.

The solution I've come up with (maybe others found it first, but it's new to me) is to continue curating special features normally and placing them under the
corresponding movie using the various extras folders Emby supports.

What's new is that I've created an additional library I call 'Special Features'. I've made it a movie library, but turned off all external metadata sources. Instead of actual video
files, though, this library only contains STRMS pointing back to the extras from my Movie library that I consider to be worthy of standing on their own.

I manually curate the images and metadata for these STRMS and group them into standard collections in ways that makes sense.

Now, users can find the special features under the movie they're interested in, or they can just browse a curated set of the best special features available on my server.

The drawbacks I've found so far is that I can't stop special feature collections from contaminating the main 'Collections' grid view. I'd prefer that this view contain only
movies. The other is that because the video file and STRM entries are independent, I need to maintain two separate nfos and image sets for each special feature.

I hope this helps anyone who likes special features as much as my house does.

 

 

Some of my libraries, including my new 'Special Features' library:

 

The grid view of my curated special features 'movie' library:

 

The collection view for a grouping of related special features (I'm still curating the rest of the Appendices):

 

A single item view for the special feature library. The key here is that this is just a STRM pointing to the real file which lives in my Movie library under A New Hope.

 

Here's that same Empire of Dreams special feature under its true location under A New Hope:

 

[rbjtech 5285]

Some nice ideas

STRM's are very useful - I've used that feature multiple times in a few utilities in the tools section.

I also used the 'library' idea for the 'Recommendations' virtual library 

The only downside to STRM's is you don't get the metadata (unless you copy it yourself) and emby won't scan it for Media Info until played.

 

 

Edited June 23, 2021 by rbjtech

[roaku 842]

8 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

Some nice ideas

STRM's are very useful - I've used that feature multiple times in a few utilities in the tools section.

I also used the 'library' idea for the 'Recommendations' virtual library idea 

The only downside to STRM's is you don't get the metadata (unless you copy it yourself) and emby won't scan it for Media Info until played.

 

 

Thanks.

Ya, I've discovered the media info scanning limitation for strms. But, since I'm already stuck with manually curating the metadata and creating custom images for these custom special features one by one, clicking the play button after adding an entry doesn't really add too much to the workload.

Edited June 23, 2021 by roaku

[roaku 842]

I know maybe 4 people care about this including myself but...

As I've been chugging along building up my strm based special features library, I've discovered that quite a few of these features exist over at TMDB, but I still don't want to risk turning on any metadata sources since so much of this library could trigger bad matches.

For these cases, I create my movie folder and strm structure first in my main movies library to let it populate the nfo and images with the TMDB source metadata. Once that scanning is finished, I mv the movie folder over to my special features library.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/510714-the-director-and-the-jedi
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/336592-the-science-of-interstellar
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/529107-inside-interstellar
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/201025-the-burly-man-chronicles
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/703363-ending-the-knight
https://www.themoviedb.org/search?query=The Matrix Revisited
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/125231-the-batmobile
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/729605-rise-of-skywalker-making-of