Comment by mock-possum
8 hours ago
How would jellyfin be able to tell whether the video files in a directory are movies or tv? What does going nuts actually look like, and what causes it?
8 hours ago
How would jellyfin be able to tell whether the video files in a directory are movies or tv? What does going nuts actually look like, and what causes it?
Not OP, but I've run into similar instances of Jellyfin "going nuts."
Mixed media type libraries are depreciated and "broken" according to the documentation[1], which is fair enough, but sometimes this results in weirdness if a TV-show is also part of a franchise and has associated TV-movies (e.g. the Battlestar Galactica reboot, Futurama, or Breaking Bad). If you want to keep those movies on your file system in a folder with the other stuff from the franchise, Jellyfin often can't handle it. And it's not obvious to new users whether these TV-movies belong in a TV-shows library or a movies library.
I've also noticed it cannot handle additional layers of folders (i.e. for Genres) in TV show libraries, but it can handle that layer in movie libraries. Failure mode (the "going nuts") looks like those genre folders recognized as bizarre or obscure television shows, and nothing scanned the next layer down.
I haven't looked into how their scanning algorithms work, but it's definitely frustrating that there's not a button or feature to say: "No, Jellyfin, this is a folder, not a show or movie. Try scanning again on the subtree starting here."
Honestly, any software that either silently/automatically reorganizes a user's files and folders (not Jellyfin, but there are others that do this... even FOSS projects) or demands a specific meta-hierarchy on the file system is frustrating to anyone who deliberately keeps their files and folders well-organized.
[1]: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/mixed-movies-...
I bit the bullet years ago and just have separate folders for the two, using recommended naming conventions.
I realised it doesn't improve my life, to care about folder structure and naming, so much that I insist on retaining it and hobbling the media browsing frontend. The media browser brings in massively more metadata than I would have personally collected and encoded into the filepath/filename, and makes it nicely hyperlinked and searchable. Screenshots, posters, backdrops, cast, director, ...
You may think differently. In which case, enjoy your UI being a series of nested folders.
What I have for mixed media are Jellyfin's Collections, where I can mix together films, TV series, music, books on any given topic. That's not accounting for TV show "specials" which live with the TV show, if TheTVDB.com honours it thusly.
Are you sure? At least with Kodi for specials like Futurama you make a Season 0 with them that the scrapers understand. Seems like Jellyfin understands that too: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows
I guess for Theatrical TV show movies like The Simpsons Movie it might be more complicated, but worse case you always create or edit your own NFO files with something like MediaElch and have Jellyfin use those.
I think it's better to have genres in the NFO files and not in the folder structure. A show or movie can easily fall into two or genres which is not going to get captured by a single folder.