It’s a familiar frustration for any serious TV show collector: you’ve meticulously organized your digital library, only for your media server to throw it all into a chaotic jumble. This is precisely the pickle one user, Shlammod, found themselves in while trying to set up their Emby server.
Shlammod had a neat setup. Most TV shows lived in their own folders within a main 'TV Shows' directory. However, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) shows were tucked away in a dedicated 'MCU' subfolder. When they tried to add the main 'TV Shows' directory to Emby, the 'MCU' folder was scanned, but all the individual shows were bizarrely recognized as seasons of a single, non-existent series. Images vanished, and everything was miscategorized.
The initial thought was to create a separate library for the 'MCU' folder. This worked perfectly, with each MCU show being correctly identified. But here's where the real head-scratcher began: after setting up the separate MCU library, adding the main 'TV Shows' directory back into the mix caused the entire MCU library to scramble. Suddenly, the MCU shows were displaying incorrect season numbers (like 'season 2013'), losing their artwork, and being reclassified as seasons again.
Trying a '.ignore' file in the 'MCU' directory didn't help; it simply prevented the content from being scanned at all. This was particularly vexing because Shlammod mentioned that Kodi handled this exact folder structure without a hitch, leading them to believe Emby should be capable of it too.
The core of the problem seems to lie in how Emby (or any media server, for that matter) interprets nested folder structures, especially when dealing with a mix of standard TV show organization and a specific, contained collection like the MCU shows. The server can get confused about hierarchy, mistaking a folder containing multiple shows for a single season or even a series itself.
One suggestion offered was to restructure the main 'TV Shows' directory. Instead of having 'MCU' directly within 'TV Shows', the idea was to create two distinct subfolders: one for 'MCU' and another for 'Other TV' shows. Then, add both of these subfolders as separate library paths within Emby. This approach essentially tells Emby, 'Here are two distinct collections of TV shows,' rather than one main collection with a peculiar sub-folder.
While Shlammod was hesitant to move their backed-up shows, the principle of simplifying the top-level structure is often key. Sometimes, a bit of reorganization at the root level can prevent the deeper layers from getting tangled. The mention of symlinks also hints at potential workarounds where a single set of files can appear in multiple locations without actual duplication, which might be a way to achieve the desired organization without moving data.
Ultimately, the experience highlights that while media servers are powerful, they rely heavily on clear, consistent folder structures. When that structure deviates, especially with nested collections, the server's parsing engine can get scrambled, leading to a frustrating display of misidentified content. The solution often lies in either simplifying the structure or ensuring each distinct collection is clearly delineated to the server.
