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I suppose you could change the structure rather fast with a few well-placed batch operations in a shell, though I also understand why you wouldn't want it.

Regarding the randomly merged episodes, perhaps the culprit isn't the folder structure or file name patterns, but metadata on the files themselves? I never had this particular situation, but I wasted my fair share of life dealing with assumptions music players make about ID3 tags, and how they're routinely broken by files sourced from random places on the Internet.

> I wasted my fair share of life dealing with assumptions music players make about ID3 tags, and how they're routinely broken by files sourced from random places on the Internet.

Musicbrainz Picard is a life-saver. I don't add any audio to my collection without putting it through Picard first.

I haven't tried implementing it, but my idea is to write a script that automatically creates a "correctly" organized directory tree, populated with symlinks to the arbitrarily-located real files.

Manage your stuff with tinymediamanager. It will auto rename files folders, download nfos thumbnails, covers.

TV shows just need s01e01

Then import the folders and dont allow jellyfin to fetch online data.

The *arr stack can be used to rename files in a sane way

A good tip is to include the imdb or tmdb ID in the file name for movies and in the directory for TV/Anime, it'll make things unambiguous

> The sync feature on the web UI works surprisingly well.

Hmm ? I've been having issues with SyncPlay since forever. Media stuck for some people, stuck at loading. Playing until some point, then freezing.

Basically whenever I'm doing something with SyncPlay it's "press play and if it does actually start never press pause"

But that's literally my only issue with Jellyfin, I've been using it for the past year and it's awesome.

I used to have similar problem till I started using hardlinks because of arr apps now I have pretty looking file and folder structure for jellyfin.

Jellyfin doesn't even work quite right if you try to follow their documentation to the letter in how to structure and name your directories. I hope they improve that aspect, because it can be time consuming and irritating to fix when it doesn't work right. It largely works though.

Does Jellyfin allow using external metadata agents and scanners like Plex? I basically couldn't use Plex at all if I didn't have HAMA and ASS installed for scanning anime files.

It has plugins for other metadata providers like anidb, anilist and anisearch. I've had no issues identifying all the anime I have.

So if you give it "[GroupName] Name of the Series - Electric Boogaloo - 03 (1080p).mkv", it understands that it's season one, episode one of a show called "Name of the Series - Electric Boogaloo"? Because Plex in its default state would rather you using the Name.of.the.Series.Electric.Boogaloo.S01E03 formatting, which would entail renaming basically everything. That's why having ASS as the scanner to avoid renaming is essential for me.

I'm not certain about that specific example. I think it should work if it's, say, a single season show. Otherwise if you put it under Show\Season 1\, I think it should work too. I have a range of different naming schemes and Jellyfin is able to recognize all of them. I've only had to put in manual effort for extras like interviews and trailers, which can be put in an "extras" folder in a show/movie directory next to the actual video file(s).

Yes, you set Jellyfin to use local .NFO or .INFO files .. these can be created by third party agents ( eg: ember https://github.com/DanCooper/Ember-MM-Newscraper , etc )

Jellyfin will alter those to add paths to media it downloads and perhaps overwrite curated descriptions with those from theTVDB, IMDB, theMovieDB, etc.

YMMV test in isolation to be sure, etc.

That's not really the same thing though. With Plex, you can customise the code it runs to scan the filenames and you don't need to create any additional files.

There are multiple approaches to curating metadata. Maintaining .nfo masters | backups is handy when migrating between media managers or finetuning descriptions not in line with online data DB's.

Try dashboard > libraries > display > Display a folder view to show plain media folders

This is interesting, I feel like Plex doesn't have such a feature

TV Shows > TV Shows [dropdown, top left] > Folders

It's very poorly laid out in a list, but I have found it useful before.

Do you have a separate library for movies and tv shows?

Yes, I've tried separating them out, I've tried putting them all together, I even tried putting it as a photo library because apparently that was supposed to be closer to a raw folder layout, but the issue still persisted.

I think there's a kind of disconnect between the kind of users that use these media libraries - a lot of people seem to really value the metadata aspect of it, how it collects all the info the IMDB or whatever and tries to sort and match stuff.

And then there's people like me who just want a server that can handle any file I throw at it and play it over the internet, I'm not too fussed about the other aspects. Part of me thinks that maybe I'm using the wrong tool for the job, but Jellyfin does otherwise work really well for what I want, folder gripes aside.

> And then there's people like me who just want a server that can handle any file I throw at it and play it over the internet

I just use nginx (with directory listing enabled), let's encrypt and HTTP basic auth. That basically gives you what you're asking for. But it won't do the fancy web sync so that you can watch it with your friends.

That's part of why I now have multiple Shield TV boxes in my home, mostly using Kodi over SMB/CIFS shares to my NAS. It's not as friendly for outside the home, but it's nice internally.

I've been thinking I'd like to expand to start capturing the YouTube channels I watch most and dump into series directories for them. I've gotten tired of trying to work around what YouTube seems fit to shove in my direction. I really wish there was a "don't show me content from this channel" option, as if you click on any bait, you keep getting that channel for weeks after under suggestions.

> I really wish there was a "don't show me content from this channel" option

In a browser, tap the 3 dots on any video and "don't recommend channel" is right there.

What is VC?

Internet slang for voice chat

Otherwise known as an acronym.

To be perfectly pedantic, it’s an initialization. Acronyms are initializations that can be pronounced as words.

To add to the pedantry, I believe the correct word is initialism.

Therefore the pendatry was not "perfect" as it was claimed above.

One might even argue that it is impossible to be "perfectly pedantic".

Otherwise known as an oxymoron.