Stop media scanning from renaming seasons?

[archon]

I have a library of short video clips set up as Shows, mostly because that gives the organisational structure I want the media to be displayed in (high-level category -> more specific categories). I have folder structure similar to this:

Science
--Physics
----video1.mp4
--Space
----video2.mp4
----video3.mp4
Misc
--Language
----english.mp4
--Outdoors
----waterfall1.mp4

What I want in Jellyfin (and Swiftfin, which is why I'm using Shows instead of mixed movies/shows) is for someone to go to this library, pick a topic, and then get videos. I don't need to have two levels of topics, that's only to accommodate the requirements for a Shows library, I'd be perfectly happy with just one topic level. But I do want it to be usable in Swiftfin, which means I'm limited to Movies or Shows until Swiftfin allows using a mixed movies/shows library or a music videos library.

In general, this is working fairly well. The top-level folder is shown as the "show" name, and the videos are shown according to their metadata, and I can edit either one in the UI and have the changes persist. What's not working so well is the "seasons". In the folder structure above I would have a "show" called "Misc" and "seasons" called "Language" and "Outdoors". Except every time the library is scanned, the seasons are all changed to be "Season Unknown". I can't seem to stop that from happening, I've even gone into the metadata editor and selected the option to lock any further changes but Jellyfin still insists on changing the names of the second level to "Season Unknown". All metadata downloaders are off and it's set to never update from the Internet. How can I stop this from happening? Or is there some way I can trick Swiftfin into using a mixed movies/shows or music video library?

[TheDreadPirate]

You should try using the Music Videos library type. It will just display the folder structure and names.

[Efficient_Good_5784]

What you want used to work on v10.8.13 and older. With v10.9, seasons no longer retain custom names after a scan, even if locked.

There should be a fix comming soon: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/pull/11674

Alternatively, you can add a negative number to the season's "season #" tag to make the auto renaming to "Season ..." be nullified until the fix comes. The negative number won't break playback order since Jellyfin relies on the episodes' own season & episode number in their specific metadata to determine the order of playback.

[west]

It appears to have been fixed with the latest update. Just tested it and locked season names are persisting.

[archon]

You should try using the Music Videos library type. It will just display the folder structure and names.

Music Videos won't work, like I said, I want it to work with Swiftfin and Swiftfin doesn't work with Music Video library types yet.

What you want used to work on v10.8.13 and older. With v10.9, seasons no longer retain custom names after a scan, even if locked.

There should be a fix comming soon: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/pull/11674

Alternatively, you can add a negative number to the season's "season #" tag to make the auto renaming to "Season ..." be nullified until the fix comes. The negative number won't break playback order since Jellyfin relies on the episodes' own season & episode number in their specific metadata to determine the order of playback.

It appears to have been fixed with the latest update. Just tested it and locked season names are persisting.

The fix isn't working. I have Jellyfin Server 10.9.2, which the release notes say should address this, but I just tried it. Library type Shows, same folder structure. Rename the season, lock it against all future changes, scan the library again, all the seasons are renamed back to "Season Unknown".

[Efficient_Good_5784]

Do your seasons have a "season number" in their metadata, or do you leave it blank?

[archon]

Do your seasons have a "season number" in their metadata, or do you leave it blank?

No season number, which I expect is causing the initial add of the "season" to be weird but the actual problem is that they're being renamed every library scan even when I say the metadata should be locked.

But it looks like it should be fixed by https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/pull/11719, hopefully that can get merged and a new release out soon.

[Efficient_Good_5784]

An interesting thing about the metadata lock is that only applies to fields that have things saved. It doesn't apply to things you leave blank. So if you do a hard refresh, all the empty fields will come back (but all your previous filled-in things will remain as how you locked them).

[Efficient_Good_5784]

Came back here to say that this is indeed not fixed. It was "semi-fixed" with v10.9.2.

Are you running full scans that search or replaces metadata? I found out that doing the first basic scan that only finds new files will not change the season names, which is why I thought v10.9.2 fixed the issue.
The dashboard's "Scan All Libraries" option also keeps my season names intact.

It's just now when I have to run a scan that replaces something, the seasons under that scan all change back to season # in my case.