DVR glitch, recording same episode over and over

Hi guys, I have a library from a plex DVR which I moved to another plex install which I’m having several issues with, but this new issue is really bizarre

Some of the episodes of American dad are being recorded repeatedly:
/mnt/tv_shows/American Dad (2005)/Season 01/American Dad (2005) - S01E09 - A Smith in the Hand.ts
/mnt/tv_shows/American Dad (2005)/Season 01/American Dad (2005) - S01E09 - A Smith in the Hand (copy 1).ts

There’s one episode which now has 3 duplicated recordings.

In the Recording Schedule, when I click on this episode, the name of the episode is the same as the one that’s recorded so why is it not noticing that it’s already there?

What should I try? Deleting the show from the album and letting it re-scan? Last time I tried this the matching was even worse and it straight up didn’t match half of the episodes at all which prompted it to keep re-recording them indefinitely anyhow since for some reason when the duplicate is recorded the matching isn’t updated.

Let me know what further information I can provide to help with this.

PS: My Shows agent is setup to TheTVDB as primary

here’s another example:

/mnt/tv_shows/American Dad (2005)/Season 05/American Dad (2005) - S05E16 - Bully for Steve.ts
/mnt/tv_shows/American Dad (2005)/Season 05/American Dad (2005) - S05E16 - Bully for Steve (copy 1).ts
/mnt/tv_shows/American Dad (2005)/Season 05/American Dad (2005) - S05E16 - Bully for Steve (copy 2).ts

wtf

Can you provide screenshots of the recording settings, both the first screen (basic settings) and the advanced settings.

Here are the 2 pages, 1st one I modded the css in inspector to show the whole thing in one screen, it’s not normally like that.

These settings are basically all default, I tried deleting the recording and re-adding it and changed nothing in it.

Have you watched these files? Should be able to play them manually outside of Plex using VLC or some other app so you can open each individually. I personally have never used the allow partial airings and am wondering if these are all partial airings where something happened during the recording and Plex restarted recording the episode.

I had this problem until I renamed “American Dad!” to “American Dad”.

Plex saw a lot of episodes of “American Dad” in the TV guide. It tried to match this to existing shows but there was no match for that show according to the log – the library only contained something called “American Dad!” which it apparently thought was something different due to the exclamation mark. When I renamed the library entry to remove the exclamation mark, everything started working. (I actually did this in the middle of an EPG refresh and saw in the log that it could suddenly match the show against the library.)

I assume that as soon as it actually recorded the first episode, it looked it up at TheTVDB (https://www.thetvdb.com/?tab=series&id=73141) where there is an exclamation mark, and so the show got matched and renamed to include the exclamation mark. Or maybe I had an episode from before the DVR, or something. But this process doesn’t rename the EPG entry, and presumably the TVDB matching agent is less strict about matching names than the DVR scheduler is…

A few log entries before renaming:

Jan 05, 2018 17:06:25.696 [0x7f49eebfe700] DEBUG - DVR:Subscription: Failed to resolve subscription for 'guid: com.gracenote.onconnect://show/185040 thumb: http://tmsimg.plex.tv/assets/p13214201_b1t_v5_aa.jpg title: American Dad type: 2 year: 2005' to library item
Jan 05, 2018 17:06:25.696 [0x7f49eebfe700] DEBUG - DVR:Subscription: Checking in provider Program Guide
Jan 05, 2018 17:06:25.696 [0x7f49eebfe700] DEBUG - DVR:Subscription: MATCH for GUID scheme, directly checking.
Jan 05, 2018 17:06:25.696 [0x7f49eebfe700] DEBUG - Downloading document http://127.0.0.1:32400/tv.plex.providers.epg.onconnect:4/metadata/com%2Egracenote%2Eonconnect%3A%2F%2Fshow%2F185040
Jan 05, 2018 17:06:25.697 [0x7f49eebfe700] DEBUG - Auth: We found auth token (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx), enabling token-based authentication.
Jan 05, 2018 17:06:25.697 [0x7f49eebfe700] DEBUG - Auth: Came in with the master token, authorization succeeded.
Jan 05, 2018 17:06:25.700 [0x7f49eebfe700] DEBUG - There were 0 top-level paths for American Dad.

After renaming the show:

Jan 05, 2018 17:59:11.009 [0x7f4a373f6700] DEBUG - There were 2 top-level paths for American Dad.
...
Jan 05, 2018 17:59:57.569 [0x7f4a393fe700] DEBUG - EPG: Matched show to 'American Dad' in library.
...
Jan 05, 2018 18:00:00.375 [0x7f4a393fe700] DEBUG - EPG[onconnect]: Enhanced 'American Dad' show with universal details

Interesting, did you rename it on the filesystem or within plex (title and sort title)? Or both?

as for @johnm_ColaSC question, yeah these all play fine, none of them are partials. They fully record without errors, newer ones get comskipped since tha tfunctionality was added since the old ones were recorded, but it just keeps recording them over and over. As you can see in that one case there were 3 of them.

All of my shows are setup like this

Oh, looks like it was called American Dad (2005) on the file system anyhow, no !

I just renamed the show in plex to remove the ! and I’ll report if this fixes the issue, thanks

I can confirm this is the fix.

I just rescanned my library and got a bunch of stuff like this:
Jan 13, 2018 02:13:58.451 [0x7f389c3ff700] DEBUG - DVR:Grabber: Cancelling operation for ‘American Dad - E6 - Iced, Iced Babies’ with status cancelled.

So in the future if i have any other shows like this I’ll try to match them up with the name in the log that it’s trying to match.

Thanks

@maddios said:
Interesting, did you rename it on the filesystem or within plex (title and sort title)? Or both?

Within Plex, and only the ordinary title. Good to see that it worked for you as well!