SOLVED: Jellyfin loses track of already watched movies

[Lance]

Hello,

i am having trouble for quite some time now that Jellyfin loses track of movies i watched. As far as i can see, its only movies that are affected, not tv series, but i may be wrong and just havent noticed it on tv series.

Troubleshooting is really hard, because if i watch a movie or mark a movie as seen, it stays that way for several days or longer until jellyfin for some reason loses the tracking and shows the movie as unseen. I havent really noticed a system how track is lost from the movies, also it seems that not every movie is affected, so some stay as "seen".

Usually my jellyfin version is up to date. My setup is the usually {redacted by mod} searches movies -> save on NAS -> jellyfin plays from NAS

Initially i tried tracking with the metadata file (i am the only user, so i am fine with that metadata can only track one user) and switched that setting on in jellyfin, but that didnt really work. So i tried using trackt to solve my problems. But it seems that i still have the exact same problem with trackt than just tracking with metadata.

I was wondering if anyone has encountered a similar problem and what the solution was, or where the error was. Or when other people use trakt how their settings are so i can try them.


Thank you

[Lance]

As classic rubber duck debugging i think i found whats causing Jellyfin to lose track. In my movie folders, i have a .nfo created by radar with the name of the movie e.g. "The Movie Name(2017).nfo". Jellyfin however wants a nfo in the format just movie.nfo.

I noticed this that when i check the folder when i mark a movie as seen, jellyfin creates this movie.nfo. I suspect that at some point my system deletes the movie.nfo and then jellyfin also loses track of the movie.

Based on the documentation, it seems that i cant change the fileanme of the nfo jellyfin looks?

I know the next question may be off topic but maybe somebody knows the answer and somebody else in the future may have the same problem, but can i change {redacted by mod} to save the metadata to movie.nfo instead of using the name of the movie and slap a .nfo behind it?

[Lance]

Ok, and continuing talking to myself, i found the setting in {redacted by mod}. Under Settings -> metadata chose your prefered metadata format (e.g. Kodi) and the tick the box "use movie.nfo".
Afterwards just update all movies

{redacted by mod} seems to be fine as the watched status is still correctly written into the episode .nfo, even when the name of the episode is the same long name as the episode itself. edit: Ok, yeah because jellyfin want the name of the episode.nfo to be the same as the filenmae of the epsiode. Therefore its correctly writing the watched status in the correct nfo. It was just movies which had the problem.

Keeping everything here so that in the future this maybe helps somebody.

[Lance]

Ok, i have to follow up again on this, even if it sounds strange. The solution above may work for some, but it still wasnt producing the result i wanted. The problem currently is, i suspect, that when radar sees a update to the metadata, it replaces the existing nfo and therefore also erasing my watched status. To confirm this i have disabled in jellyfin the option to save the watched status in the nfo. It should save the watched status now in the database.

If this now works as suspected, i may leave it that way, but thats not really a satisfiying solution. I would like to have the watched status stored somewhere, so that i could migrate it or use it for something else. At the same time i like that radar creates the metadata when downloading a movie so everything is "ready to use", in case i would want to use a different media player and because i currently dont know when exactly jellyfin creates the metadata (when scanning the library? Couldnt find anything in the docs).
I also dont really want to use trakt or similar plugins because
a) i dont watch stuff on different platforms for trakt to become important for me and
b) just using trakt so that i can keep my watched status seem a bit overkill/unneccessary?