Library content models
A library content model determines which entities and relationships a catalogue expects to find in a media collection.
A content model tells a library what kinds of things exist and how they fit together. A television model expects series, seasons and episodes. A movie model expects films and their playable sources. A music model needs relationships among tracks, albums and credited artists.
This affects recognition, metadata scope and browsing. It is more consequential than choosing a different icon for the same pile of files.
One directory, two interpretations
Imagine this fictional directory:
Harbour Watch (2020)/
Season 1/
Harbour Watch S01E01.mkv
Harbour Watch S01E02.mkv
Under an episodic model, the outer name supplies series context and the two files represent children within a season. A series poster belongs to the parent; an episode still and episode title belong to one child. The number 01 only makes sense within its season and series.
Under a general video model, the same paths might simply identify two independent videos. Their shared directory does not, by itself, establish which catalogue series they are episodes of. That reading may suit personal footage, but it loses relationships needed for season browsing and next-episode selection.
Emby's library setup documentation describes content types and the limited mixed-content option. A mixed folder does not make all of the specialized models equally available: the server still needs sufficient structure to interpret each resource.
Entities have different scopes
| Observation | A useful entity relationship | What goes wrong if flattened |
|---|---|---|
| Twelve episodes belong to one series | Episode → season → series | The series is repeated as twelve unrelated titles |
| Two encodes represent the same cut | Media sources → one movie item | The movie appears twice instead of offering a source choice |
| One album has several tracks | Track → album, with artist credits | Album identity is confused with each track's performer |
| A trailer promotes a feature | Supplement → parent movie | A short promotional video is mistaken for another full movie |
These are explanatory relationships, not an Emby schema definition. Public models such as Schema.org's Movie and TVSeries describe some of the same distinctions; Emby's item API exposes its own item types, parent relationships and media-source information.
A parent entity need not be a playable file. A series page represents the show and organizes episodes. Conversely, one playable file may cover more than one episode. “One object equals one file” cannot describe both cases.
Matching needs a model before it needs a title
A catalogue search for a film named The Crossing asks a different question from a search for the episode with that title in Harbour Watch. For the episode, the series identity, season and selected episode order supply much stronger context than the title alone.
Technical properties do not resolve that meaning. A probe can establish that a file contains 42 minutes of H.264 video; it cannot infer from the codec whether the resource is an episode, a concert or a home video.
The same principle applies to field inheritance. A series overview describes the series, not every episode's plot. A shared studio credit may be relevant at the series level, while an episode guest credit belongs to a specific episode. Copying all parent data to all children creates plausible-looking but inaccurate descriptions.
Physical nesting is evidence, not the entire model
Folders and filenames help communicate relationships, but a catalogue can also express associations that have no corresponding storage directory. Genres, credits and collection memberships cross those boundaries. A content model combines those descriptive relationships with the resource structure instead of requiring every view to reproduce the disk layout.
For the Harbour Watch directory, the decisive result is an episode associated with the correct series and season. Its codec is a property of the playable source; the parent relationship gives the programme its place in the catalogue.