Converting from Plex

[FrankB12 0]

Is there anyway to pull the meta data from my Plex Library into Emby?  I have not downloaded or installed Emby yet, but have had it with Plex.  Since I have a quite large library already on Plex, (800 movies, 4000 songs, 3000 TV episodes, 8 audiobook) and only 10 gb of data on my internet plan per month, I do not want to burn it all up and have to pay extra for my data.  Currently with my working form home, I have about 2 gigs of data extra per month.    Will moving the library to Emby take a lot of data to reload all the meta data?   

[Abobader 3464]

Hello FrankB12,

** This is an auto reply **

Please wait for someone from staff support or our members to reply to you.

It's recommended to provide more info, as it explain in this thread:

Thank you.

Emby Team

[rbjtech 5284]

Does Plex keep the metadata with the media - ie if your media is d:\movies\moviename1.mkv - is there an nfo and jpg files stored along with it ?

If there is, then emby can utilise this data as well if you select to keep the metadata with the media during the library setup - ie emby does not need to re-download it.

If not (ie plex data is kept local) then there is no automated way of transferring this data I'm afraid.

However, you can of course stagger any download but turning off metadata collection for that library until you are ready -  the result will be playable media but of course no metadata - so it will look a bit ugly (but functional).

To add - the other way to look at it is a typical 'item' has between 500Kb and 1024Kb (1Mb) of metadata consisting of a 'poster' and a 'backdrop'.  Items such as thumbnails are generated locally, so you don't need to worry about those.

So if you have 800 movies, then that's 800Mb worth of metadata.    If you do the sums, 10Gb may be enough, but it will be very hard to be accurate as some items may use over 1Mb, others may use much less.

Edited July 13, 2021 by rbjtech

[Carlo 4561]

Emby can't use the info pulled down by Plex as it's stored differently.

Emby will only be pulling down graphics and text so it's not going to need lots of bandwidth to do this.

What I would suggest is setting up your Movie library and only that first and let it scan.  That way it's only 800 items and you can see the bandwidth used. Then add your TV Shows, etc.

For your music make sure you have good tagging of the tracks as this is what Emby will pull from to recognize your music library.

[MBSki 1114]

11 minutes ago, cayars said:

For your music make sure you have good tagging of the tracks as this is what Emby will pull from to recognize your music library.

This part is really important. Plex does a much better job with music that isn't tagged. Emby (IMO) needs the tags. Make sure they're organized and tag with MusicBrainz ids using mp3tag or Picard. Also set the Music library structure to perfectly organized if you're able to get everything organized.

[Luke 42081]

Musicbrainz id's are not required. Emby will be fine with just artist and album names.

[MBSki 1114]

4 minutes ago, Luke said:

Musicbrainz id's are not required. Emby will be fine with just artist and album names.

Not based on experience Luke. 

[Carlo 4561]

I don't really use Musicbrainz IDs unless needed.

[MBSki 1114]

5 minutes ago, cayars said:

I don't really use Musicbrainz IDs unless needed.

That was my approach at first, but now it seems everything needs a MusicBrainzID. Take a look at the thread here about the Album year. Music: Where is the year for an album coming from? - Page 2 - General/Windows - Emby Community. I can't get the year added without the MusicBrainzID, and even with the MusicBrainzID the year doesn't always load. It seems to be a WMA and possible punctuation issue. It would be nice to hear from Luke what's going on here.

[Deathsquirrel 745]

21 minutes ago, mbarylski said:

That was my approach at first, but now it seems everything needs a MusicBrainzID. Take a look at the thread here about the Album year. Music: Where is the year for an album coming from? - Page 2 - General/Windows - Emby Community. I can't get the year added without the MusicBrainzID, and even with the MusicBrainzID the year doesn't always load. It seems to be a WMA and possible punctuation issue. It would be nice to hear from Luke what's going on here.

MBZ is not required.  You can manually tag in any tag editing program for example.  MBZ is a decent source for metadata you can use to automatically tag tracks, that's all.  The issue in the post you reference appears to be specific to WMA files and those are, to put it mildly, a very small percentage of audio tracks in existence.

What DOES matter as it pertains to MBZ data is that, if it exists, it should match the other equivalent tags.  So if your Album Artist or Artist tags don't match the MBZ Album Artist or MBZ Artist tags you can get some surprising results since you're feeding the system contradictory data.

[MBSki 1114]

7 minutes ago, Deathsquirrel said:

MBZ is not required.  You can manually tag in any tag editing program for example.  MBZ is a decent source for metadata you can use to automatically tag tracks, that's all.  The issue in the post you reference appears to be specific to WMA files and those are, to put it mildly, a very small percentage of audio tracks in existence.

It depends on the user. 95% of my files are WMA.

7 minutes ago, Deathsquirrel said:

What DOES matter as it pertains to MBZ data is that, if it exists, it should match the other equivalent tags.  So if your Album Artist or Artist tags don't match the MBZ Album Artist or MBZ Artist tags you can get some surprising results since you're feeding the system contradictory data.

Yea, except that even when it does match it doesn't always work. I don't know how you're getting the data to populate (like year), cause it doesn't work for me unless I add the MusicBrainz ID's. 

It could just be WMA, but won't know until @Luke responds. Regardless, it should work no matter what format is used.

[Luke 42081]

MusicBrainz id's can be used to enhance but nothing requires it.

[MBSki 1114]

10 minutes ago, Luke said:

MusicBrainz id's can be used to enhance but nothing requires it.

It's like I'm talking to a brick wall. From MY experience MusicBrainzID's ARE needed. In some cases, the only way I've been able to get metadata to populate in Emby is by using the MusicBrainzID's. You tell me I don't have to, but when it doesn't work you don't have an answer. Can you please respond back to this thread about why it's not working? Music: Where is the year for an album coming from? - Page 2 - General/Windows - Emby Community. I've tried both with and without MusicBrainzID's and neither method works for the albums I've posted. 

[Deathsquirrel 745]

3 minutes ago, mbarylski said:

It's like I'm talking to a brick wall. From MY experience MusicBrainzID's ARE needed. In some cases, the only way I've been able to get metadata to populate in Emby is by using the MusicBrainzID's. You tell me I don't have to, but when it doesn't work you don't have an answer. Can you please respond back to this thread about why it's not working? Music: Where is the year for an album coming from? - Page 2 - General/Windows - Emby Community. I've tried both with and without MusicBrainzID's and neither method works for the albums I've posted. 

I'd strongly recommend against dragging your issue into this thread.  You're likely to confuse the support of your own problem.  You have what appears to be a WMA-specific issue where Emby most likely doesn't recognize one or more WMA tag names.  That's almost certainly got nothing to do with this thread as it's not related to moving from Plex unless the OP is also a WMA user.  Statistically, that's not likely.

Edited July 13, 2021 by Deathsquirrel

[MBSki 1114]

12 minutes ago, Deathsquirrel said:

I'd strongly recommend against dragging your issue into this thread.  You're likely to confuse the support of your own problem.  You have what appears to be a WMA-specific issue where Emby most likely doesn't recognize one or more WMA tag names.  That's almost certainly got nothing to do with this thread as it's not related to moving from Plex unless the OP is also a WMA user.  Statistically, that's not likely.

Understand....apologies. For the OP, if you are a WMA user...beware.

I have both Plex and Emby running at all times, and I can say with 100% confidence that Plex requires a lot less care and feeding overall than Emby does. I never had to use MusicBrainzID's until Emby 4.6. Plex still works flawlessly with or without MusicBrainzID tags. Are the challenges I experience just because I'm a heavy WMA user? It could be. Seems highly unusual to me given WMA is a format that's been around for a VERY long time. It's a well known format, so Emby needs to work with WMA. 

[FrankB12 0]

My current issue with Plex is a transcoder error after moving the entire database and server to a newer more powerful desktop.  After 5 days still no help on their forums page, as opposed to the multiple replies my question got here.    in the process of downloading and setting up my movies like recommended above to check data usage.   

[MBSki 1114]

3 minutes ago, FrankB12 said:

After 5 days still no help on their forums page, as opposed to the multiple replies my question got here.

Yep, that's definitely where Emby shines and one of the reasons why I use Emby 95% of the time. The users and devs are invested in this platform and it definitely shows. 

[Carlo 4561]

1 hour ago, mbarylski said:

I have both Plex and Emby running at all times, and I can say with 100% confidence that Plex requires a lot less care and feeding overall than Emby does. I never had to use MusicBrainzID's until Emby 4.6. Plex still works flawlessly with or without MusicBrainzID tags. Are the challenges I experience just because I'm a heavy WMA user? It could be. Seems highly unusual to me given WMA is a format that's been around for a VERY long time. It's a well known format, so Emby needs to work with WMA. 

I have the exact opposite experience.  I set Emby and forget it and it just works for me.  With Plex I constantly have to tweak something. Keep in mind I know both platforms pretty well so this isn't a favorite thing at all on my part.

One of the "golden secrets" to having a good streaming media server is having your files in a format good for streaming such as mp3, flac, mp4, mkv with common codecs that players can use without needing special treatment.  Follow those steps and streaming life is so much easier.