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How to Edit NFO Files Safely (Without Breaking Your Library)

By MetaTana

An NFO file is a small XML sidecar that stores metadata — title, year, plot, ratings, cast, and artwork references — next to your media. Jellyfin, Emby, and Kodi read them natively, which makes them the most portable way to control how your library looks. It also makes them easy to break: one malformed tag and a server will silently ignore the whole file. Here is how to edit them without losing work.

Where NFO files live and what they cover

NFO files sit beside the media they describe, one per item:

Movies/Interstellar (2014)/movie.nfo
Shows/The Office (2005)/tvshow.nfo
Shows/The Office (2005)/Season 01/The Office (2005) - S01E01 - Pilot.nfo

A movie uses movie.nfo, a series uses tvshow.nfo, and each episode gets its own .nfo matching the video file name.

What's inside

It is plain XML. A trimmed movie example:

<movie>
  <title>Interstellar</title>
  <year>2014</year>
  <plot>A team travels through a wormhole in search of a new home.</plot>
  <rating>8.6</rating>
</movie>

You can edit any of these values in a text editor — the catch is that the file has to stay valid.

The three ways hand-editing goes wrong

  1. Malformed XML. A missing closing tag or an unescaped & makes the whole file unreadable, and most servers fail quietly — no error, just missing metadata.
  2. Getting overwritten. If your library agent is set to refresh from an online provider, your hand edits can be wiped on the next scan. Lock the item or disable provider overrides for fields you curate.
  3. Character encoding. Save as UTF-8. Non-UTF-8 accents and symbols corrupt on read.

Rules for safe edits

  • Back up the file first — copy it before you touch it.
  • Change one thing, then rescan so you know what caused a problem.
  • Escape special characters — & becomes &amp;, < becomes &lt;.
  • Validate the XML before saving if your editor can.
  • Keep the .nfo name matched to its video file for episodes.

Or don't hand-edit at all

Most NFO problems come from editing by hand across a large library. A dedicated organizer removes the risk: it generates valid NFO for you, shows the change before it writes, and journals every write so a bad edit is one rollback away.

MetaTana writes clean, valid NFO plus artwork and sidecars beside your files, with reviewable, reversible writes — and it never modifies the media itself. For player-specific setup, see the Kodi NFO, Jellyfin, and Emby guides.