How to have mix "movies" + "shows" in one folder

[Rubén Navarro López]

Hi everyone,

This is the feature that I was looking for the most. I managed myself to create a folder with shows + movies, and providers are working fine.

Probably someone knows a better solution to this, but I will explain how I do it. In my case, this is applied for documentaries that have 1 or more episodes, or animes that have movies and shows:

1º Create a library (in jellyfin) and a folder (in your drive) for shows(more than 1 episode) and set up as you want.

2º Create another library (in jellyfin) and a folder (in your drive) for movies (1 episode or movie) and set up as you want.

3º Create the last library with the option "mixed movies + shows" that jellyfin has (no need to create a new folder in our drive), and select the other 2 folders in your drive that you have already created. As shown in the screenshot attached, "docuseries" and "docupelis" would mix in one library called "documentaries", and "animepelis" and "animeseries" would mix in other called "anime". I didn't change any default setting in these libraries because it would take the config of the other 2.

4º after that, you will see the recent content like in the last screenshot.

Hope this works for you too!

-Sorry for my english, is not my native language.

If any of you has any doubts, I can help.

Hope this help developers too because their option is not working at all for me.

[TheDreadPirate]

Generally speaking, we highly recommend NOT making a mixed library. The file name parser can't handle both movies and shows. A lot of people have their library setup this way, including me.

Anime shows
Anime movies
Movies
TV shows

This way we can use anime centric metadata sources, like AniDB, on the Anime libraries and then TMDB/TVDB on everything else.

[Rubén Navarro López]

Yes, i know what you are saying, but following this way, its working fine, at least for me.

[Duvel]

Generally speaking, we highly recommend NOT making a mixed library.  The file name parser can't handle both movies and shows.  A lot of people have their library setup this way, including me.

Anime shows
Anime movies
Movies
TV shows

This way we can use anime centric metadata sources, like AniDB, on the Anime libraries and then TMDB/TVDB on everything else.

Over the last 3 years I have read this several times from Jellyfin admins, and this stance is not realistic. Mixed contain should be a thing and is not avoidable in many situations.
I think you are all missing the point, probably because you dont watch documentaries, and also because you have a english-speaking-only and US TV broadcasting  approach of things.

First you have to make a documentary library mixed because there are one-shot documentaries and multi episode documentaries. Example : Fahrenheit Eleven is a one-shot, Cosmos is multi episode. There's no point to display Farenheint as a serie, it should be displayed as a movie.There's no point either to put it in a "Movie" library, because it is a documentary. 
And there's no point in splitting your documentaries in 2 libraries that would be either Oneshots or Episode based. Because a library should be functional and not technical.

Secondly users can have a lot of TV shows that are not a "serie", but rather "local contain" created by national state-sponsored broadcasters that are usually the most watched in a country, at least  in Europe. Like BBC, France Television, Rai (Italy), TVE(Spain), RTBF and VRT (Belgium FR and Belgium NL), etc...  You may have one-shot shows or episode shows. And it can be anything: political debate, Investigations, Nature doc, Humor/family show, Theatre play, etc... And it is completely logical for some users that those are in the same library.

The mixed libraries works more or less with Jellyfin once you have understood how to excatly structure the subfolders, so the parser can switch over oneshot or episode based contain... it took me a while to understand this. So I personally dont have much issues with how it works at the moment, although there's room for improvement.

But each time I read an admin writing what you wrote I am fearing that one day you will stop supporting the Mixed contain or at least not improve it anymore, because you dont understand how important it is.... and this would be bad for a part of the user base.

I mean, instead of discouraging users to have Mixed contain library, you should just do the exact opposite : improving the Mixed contain parsing and display, and encourage users to use it in some situations because it just work well

IMO the first thing to modify on your end, would be to let the admin define if something in a mixed library is oneshot or episode based so the parser knows exactly where it should look for metadata and the GUI how it should display the contain.

[Rubén Navarro López]

You couldn't have said it louder.

This is a MUST option in Jellyfin and I could get it work this way, I wasn't looking forward to someone tell me that this is not recommended, I just wanted to share with the community the way that I did it to make it work.

In the future I hope this would be easier for the rest and more intuitive.

Anyway, thank you for your effort as always.

[Deleted User]

while maybe not recommended i still use this feature to put TV Movies into the Movies section
- because they will not scan as Movies

specifically for Stephen King - Rose Red, IT, The Stand and The Stand (Reboot), they are technically Shows but in my opinion do not belong in Shows

[bitmap]

I think you are all missing the point, probably because you dont watch documentaries,

This is kind of a pretentious assumption. I have an absolute crap ton of documentaries and they're in separate libraries as they fit. In fact, you don't have to do single libraries for TV Shows, you could split out docuseries and documentaries into their own libraries if that's the most important to you. Is it as convenient as everything in a single library? Not as much, but the metadata is the main driver behind why you choose a library type.

If you can get your metadata correct before creating the library, you might be able to get a mixed library to function properly, but I'm not familiar with the pitfalls of mixed libraries as I avoided them.

[Duvel]

I think you are all missing the point, probably because you dont watch documentaries,

This is kind of a pretentious assumption. I have an absolute crap ton of documentaries and they're in separate libraries as they fit. In fact, you don't have to do single libraries for TV Shows, you could split out docuseries and documentaries into their own libraries if that's the most important to you. Is it as convenient as everything in a single library? Not as much, but the metadata is the main driver behind why you choose a library type.

If you can get your metadata correct before creating the library, you might be able to get a mixed library to function properly, but I'm not familiar with the pitfalls of mixed libraries as I avoided them.

Not as much, but the metadata is the main driver behind why you choose a library type.

THIS, is the problem.
And you can call me pretentious if you want, no worries, but I say it again : when you think like this, you are missing the point
A library should be a FUNCTIONAL thing. The parser is a Technical thing.
And when we come to situations where we have to duplicate libraries for solving a technical issue, it is becomes a design problem.

Maybe it works well for you, but it doesn't for me. And I admit that I am probably not the average Jellyfin admin because I manage a server for  30-40 users. And when you have a lot of users and a lot of contain, and certainly for European multi-language contain, you have to organize your libraries functionally otherwise it becomes a complete mess for most users and they dont understand why it is organized like this as a documentary is a documentary, whether it has 1 episode or 2. And same goes for political debates, Theater plays, Concerts, humorous shows, Investigation journalism, family videos, or whatever something non-standard is.

[bitmap]

Not really here to argue, I just want to point out that the "thinking" you've said is flawed is not thinking, it's the reality of where Jellyfin exists. If you don't like it, you have two options: submit a feature request or code it yourself.

If you utilize a different media organizer for your metadata (e.g., Servarr, TMM), I'm sure a mixed media library would work fine. The trick described in the OP here is just to get the right metadata. Your "not like other admins" comment just increases the pretentiousness of your post. One user or 100, nobody wants their media poorly organized. I get what you're saying, but it's not a "doesn't work if you have X amount of users" situation, it's 100% your preference.

[taing]

It should be obvious there are a great many ways to organize your media. Some people have spent years creating folder structures that work for them. For these people the folder structure can be far more useful than any amount of metadata ever will be.

For example I'll pick Star Wars - there are lots of movies, TV series and a few specials. To me this is a single parent "Star Wars" in the list of media with sub folders. The might be folders for the groups of movies - Original Trilogy, Prequel Trilogy, Sequel Trilogy. The single movies might not need sub folders - Solo, Rogue One. But there would be folders for the TV series - Clone Wars, Asoka, The Mandalorian.

I'd never think of dividing this up by media type - it's all Star Wars. I could continue with other examples but the point is to understand there is never only one way to organize.