In addition to the usual Movies/Series/Music (I don't see a reason to uncouple Anime from other series) I have two additional libraries: "Stage" (for theatre productions, musicals, opera and other concerts) and "Youtube" (which is linked to a local copy of all my subscriptions and playlists, provided by Pinchflat). I also used to have a "Music Videos" library, but curating that proved too cumbersome to be worth it.

I just have it split by Movies and Shows.

But for discoverability I sometimes go to Movies, sort by "random" and then scroll from the top. This makes sure I'm not just seeing the 10 same movies all the time.

From there you can also filter by played status or genre or whatever you're feeling like at the time, because in my opinion having everything together and filtering is more useful than pre-categorizing based on what I think I'll want later, and being stuck with it.

I don’t understand what you mean by “discoverability”.

If you mean things aren’t scraping correctly you can override the incorrect scrape by clicking the three dots on the right and selecting “identify” in the webui.

Placement varies a bit depending on platform and obviously if you’re using custom css (I’m not) it changes things a lot. This brings up a custom search ui, enter the show name, click search, will return results, select the show that actually matches, click next, refresh metadata (and make sure to refresh images if the show was incorrect).

Of course if this is happening consistently read the Jellyfin docs regarding naming and folder conventions. This is one of the appeals of sonarr and radarr - they act as a precheck to ensure everything is compliant with thetvdb/moviedb, can create the proper folder structure, can rename files according to scraper guidelines, etc. if you have them set up in sonarr/radarr correctly and let them rename/manage directories Jellyfin will scrape correctly 99% of the time (sometimes it has a weird error with niche content even if it’s correct but the above trick fixes it 100% of the time in my experience).

If you mean just sorting things I have anime coupled in tv, I don’t see the point of splitting it away. It is fairly uncommon to find anime that is not in thetvdb at this point unless you have a sizable library of non English translated anime, and if that’s the case it’s still best to keep it in tv shows with anidb or whatever as a backup manual scraper (keeping it on for auto scraping will result in western shows getting a ton of garbage data in my experience, just manually scrape series that don’t work). But it’s rare even then, I (poorly) speak Japanese and have a decent library of anime that’s untranslated and far less known in the west and 85% of it just scrapes, maybe more.

Outside of that custom libraries for things that don’t “fit”: music videos, youtube videos, workout videos, etc. most of this stuff needs handwritten nfo and custom metadata tho.

Music videos have imvdb but it’s not very well managed. There’s just massive stuff missing and the model for how it works is deeply flawed. I submitted a few videos to be added a year and a half ago and logging in now they’re still sitting in the mod queue. Imagine if musicbrainz or discogs needed a 1.5yr+ moderation queue instead of just letting the community at large police things, ridiculous. We’d still be stuck on Beethoven

I also override movie titles so that they organize properly. Horror franchises where they are sometimes numbered and sometimes not is the main example I can think of. You can do this via the metadata manager in the admin panel. You change the sort title and leave the display title alone. Then Friday the 13th: the final chapter can be parsed as “Friday the 13th 4” and will be displayed in the correct order, though you have to do the entire series (especially bc they canonically did “part 2” and then “part III” which makes sorting awful. Then ones called “Jason goes to hell: the final Friday” but that isn’t the last one. Terrible)

I prefer broad categories, i.e. Movies, B-Movies, Foreign Language, Anime, Silent, and Arthouse. That sort of thing helps cut load times, helps ease browsing, aids discovery.

To those who have asked: by “discoverability” I mean being able to find something interesting to watch.

I like the idea about renaming to keep series together.

Besides movies, you can also host music. Is that is what you're after.

Music - music library

Playlist - personal playlists

Shows - all the tv shows

Movies - All the movies

Shared - a special library that's used for sharing content with friends without having to share all my library.

Podcast - for podcast

Sounds - non musical audio files (like nature sounds for relaxation)

Youtube - library connected with tube archivist

Subtitulate - special library to temporarily put shows that I want to download subtitles, to have more control over it.

Anyway, I've been thinking about taking music out, and use other service for it. As the search feature is currently unusable with so much content.

What OS are you using and what exactly do you mean by 'discovery issue' (network issue or directory scanning)?

I get what you mean, discoverability sucks in comparison to Plex or streaming services. Suggestions should be a libary tab rather than posted at the bottom. Jellyseer and Trackt are good services to then go find in jellyfin. The filters and layouts could do with some work picking a genre and not being able to create a sort conditional filter just A-Z isn't great either.

Suggestions at the bottom.

Trailers for movies.

Using third party apps like jellyseer and trakt.

I'm on Plex but ran into the same issue years ago. My method was to split Movies and TV libraries into "Movies," "Animated Movies," "TV," and "Animated TV" (also 4K TV and 4K Movies but this is all duplicate content that I don't allow to be remotely streamed).

From there, I made sure to put everything i could into collections. More recently, I've made a bunch of new movie collections based on genre, decade, director (maybe the top 15 with the most content in my library), and actor (again only the top few) and then adjusted the sort title of these collections to keep them at the top of the library in an organized fashion. ThePosterDB was great for this as I found matched poster sets for each of the above categories and so it made everything look great too.

Basically my strategy is to condense everything possible while creating new categories to easily filter things down when searching for something to watch (e.g. Action movies or 1990s movies). Some other tips are setting library filters to "unwatched" an/or creating "watch lists" of things I want to see at some point but don't feel like watching at the moment. This last one is a Plex feature but you could use something else like IMDB or Trakt to do the same.

It can definitely be a chore to find something to watch when you have several thousand choices between TV and Movies so anything you can do to knock those numbers down will help. Something else you might look into is setting up PseudoTV, ErsatzTV or something similar. These allow you to create your own "TV channels" using your content meaning you'll have channels "playing" predetermined content constantly giving you something to flip through when you can't decide on something specific. It even gives you the option to insert old commercials or change content based on the time of day so you can really mimic old network TV.

Trash-Guides.

Essentially (number = folder level):
1 media
2 usenet
3 incomplete
3 complete
2 manual_import
2 media
3 movies
4 movie X (imdb id)
3 tv
3 anime
3 live-tv

On the phone so I can't do a tree structure

My libraries:
movie
tv (shows)
anime (tv shows but primarily with asian metadata sources)
live-tv (m3u sources and EPGXML are stored here)
live-tv recordings (recordings from live-tv)
music (regular stuff)
soundtrack (usually OSTs)
custom (Non *arr sorted content)
youtube (manually ripped content)

two questions...

Is jellyfin used for anything other than watching pirated copies of media?

Is that a stupid question?