I only recently set up a Plex server to share movies and TV with friends. It was a painless setup process. I have all my media in the same downloads folder, and Plex was pretty good at parsing which things were movies and which were TV. A few things confused it (one web based TV series showed up as 13 different movies for example) but overall very good results.
Then the news broke about Plex sharing people’s porn viewing habits and even though I am not sharing any in my server, I had second thoughts. I’m not much of a power user these days but I do care about digital privacy and take measures to protect it, so I found jellyfin and gave it a shot.
The media detection is embarrassingly bad. It cannot tell the difference between movies and TV at all. The movie aliens was identified as the TV show ancient aliens. The Barbie movie was identified as some direct to streaming kids show. And so on.
The only solution I’ve found digging around in the app is to edit the metadata of every file that it got wrong. It’s time consuming and frustrating. I would prefer to just have a bare bones directory structure but I cannot find any way to make it work that way. Even just the ability to remove files from a category would be good enough but all I can seem to do is delete the media entirely.
I would prefer not to reorganize my directory structure into distinct categories of movies and TV because it is also where I seed my torrents. Is there a convenient way around this? Is this purely a skill issue? Am I dumb?
I have been getting drawn back into the FOSS world with the growing trend of enshittification but my hazy memories of horrible UX and endless annoying tweaks and workarounds from the brief time I switched to Linux (over 15 years ago at this point) are resurfacing and I’m recalling why I gave up on it back then. Furthermore my friends with whom I’m trying to share things are less tech savvy than me and I dread having to troubleshoot their Roku apps remotely. Should I just give it up and stick to Plex or is there a way around all of this that doesn’t require annoying micromanagement?
You could always just make separate movie/tv sections and just fill it with symlinks instead of the actual files. I don’t know how you’d automate it if you can’t get consistent metadata, but it’s easier than managing your own metadata fixes.
Thanks for this! I didn’t know about symlinks so with the help of the trash guides site the other poster mentioned I was able to get it set up.
It’s not perfect and it’ll be a minor chore to refresh the libraries but it’s better than it was.
Also, in the process I discovered that I am dumb, and I overlooked the “mixed movies and TV” option when adding my library before. I just added the same one twice, once as movies and once as TV. It worked for Plex but obviously caused issues in jellyfin. Doing it the correct way also gave me the no frills directory structure style that I was looking for. I’m using the symlinks for now but if I get tired of the upkeep my friends will just have to deal with the slightly less aesthetic version.
If you use trash guides it will show you how to hardlink and set up your folder structure correctly. Hardlinking is like having the file in two places but there is only one file. That way you can set up your movies/series into seperate folders and seed at the same time.
Thanks for mentioning trash guides. As I mentioned in my other reply, it helped me get everything set up easily.
Have a look at sonarr, radarr, and prowlarr. Combined with a torrent client these can manage all of the searching, downloading and organising of TV and movies which should automate all your pain points.
Im not sure if this is in the trash guides mentioned already, but I wanted to leave more breadcrumbs for you and others in case they’re helpful!
