Documentaries folder includes Series and Movies

[Jose Magalhaes]

Hi,

This is my first post and I want to congratulate this community for the great job in creating and maintaining Jellyfin. It's a great piece of code!!!

I have been around this forum for over 6 months, reading, trying to understand and experimenting with Jellyfin. Plenty of pitfalls, from file permissions to an Old Samsung TV (2014), but managed to reach a point where (almost) everything is working well. Today, I finally decided to create an account.null

My Jellyfin is running on a docker container on my Synology Nas.

I use it mostly to see Documentaries and occasionally a Film.
Films are on a folder called Video and Documentaries on a folder named Documentary. All libraries are on NAS shares.

The issue seems to be that some documentaries are considered series (mostly the ones that have more than 1 episode) and other are considered "movies" (tvdb, tmdb, etc.).
Probably due to configuration, Jellyfin will always pick the "Series" metadata, therefore wrong metadata is collected, when the documentary is labelled "movie".
Identifying the file using correct (movie) ID does not seem to update metadata, nor the images (that are correctly found when identifying).
Is there any way to have series and movies under the same folder?

I have not seen many people with this issue (combined series and movies) but the few I have seen hinted that might not be possible (without some kind of compromises).

Any suggestions to overcome with this?

[TheDreadPirate]

If I were you, I'd keep the documentaries movies in a movies library and the documentaries shows in a shows library. Then I would make a collection for these documentaries and add all of the documentaries from both libraries into it.

The mixed library type is a buggy, legacy capability and we strongly discourage it's use for the reasons you've discovered in attempting to use it.

[Jose Magalhaes]

Therefore, I must split the documentary folder into two separate folders. Then create libraries for each of the new folders, and at a later stage create a collection to join the two libraries under one structure.

Is this correct?

Before I started to use Jellyfin, my assumption was that "documentaries" would always be some kind of TV show or series. Only after the problems in getting correct metadata, I noticed that some were categorized as movies by tvdb, imdb, etc.
So, all my documentaries (collected over a decade) were (and still are) under the same folder. It was not a deliberate decision to join "series" and "movies".

[TheDreadPirate]

What you said is correct. Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of TMDB/TVDB with how they categorize a documentary as a series or movie.

[Jose Magalhaes]

@TheDreadPirate

Thanks for your quick and clear feedback.
I will try this approach by duplicating a portion of my documentaries folder. If it works well, I will extend to the full set.

I will post some results when available. In mean time, it is possible that I will have more questions...

[Jose Magalhaes]

Just to let you know that splitting the documentaries between "series" and "movies" worked very well (as expected}.
It became much easier and reliable to identify the files and get correct metadata. I have now almost all files with the correct metadata.
The remaining issues are related to Tvbd, tmdb and imdb categorization and not Jellyfin.