I have Plex running on a Western Digital NAS and on a, NVidia Shield. I have the Library and Agents settings identical.
The Western Digital works perfectly. But the Shield 1) never updates its libraries on its own and 2) sometimes mismatches or can’t even identify files the Western Digital Plex does automatically.
It’s really frustrating because, as I said, I’ve made certain those settings are identical.
The Library Settings are hard to mess up but the Shield Plex has to be manually told to refresh while the Western Digital does it whenever a new file is added.
For the file matching, the worst case is when the WD identifies it without issue but the Shield can’t find it all, even if I manually try to massage the name.
Any suggestions to remedy this would be greatly appreciated.
If so, this is expected. The SMB protocol does not notify clients of changes to the file system.
Can you provide an example (directory listing, etc) of how you have the files named/organized?
Follow Plex’s naming recommendations. Take advantage of the capability to add TMDB/IMDB/TVDB IDs to the folder/file names. Doing so tells Plex exactly which movie/show to match.
Thank you, FordGuy61. The SMB issue makes sense.
For the matching problem, keep in mind that it works 99% of the time on the WD NAS. And when it doesn’t, Fix Match does find the right show.
The directory format is straightforward. For example Entertainment->Cinema->Romance with all the romance movies in that folder as Movie Name (xxxx). For example, make a file named Robots (2023). If I do that, WD finds it without issue. Shield can’t and manually hitting Match brings up the dialog box. (Even if I delete the date, it gives me nothing. That’s wrong, too. There are more than one movie with that name.)
The agent for both is Plex Movie. It’s the only option.
Make sure your library paths are the same. IE they should point to Entertainment->Cinema->Romance not Entertainment->Cinema. Including extra sub folders will cause issues.
FordGuy61-
The file is .mkv. It was run through MetaX so all the metadata is correct. I don’t want to rename the file with the IMDB identifier because Plex does recognize it but not on the Shield. I’m grateful for your letting me know that that is an option, though.
dbirch - I misspoke. I do not specifiy Romance. I just give it Entertainment->Cinema. I have to give it the next level for TV shows, but not for movies.
I compared the paths as you suggested.
Western Digital: shares/entertainment/cinema
Shield: /storage/nas/entertainment/cinema
Also, this the first time I’ve seen it this bad. Can I fall back to the previous version to test it? It looks like I’m running the 5/18 update.
Plex does not read media title, genre, etc from MKVs. It will read those from MP4s. The only thing I know it reads from MKVs is a) individual audio & subtitle track names, and b) the Forced Display flag for subtitle tracks.
Understand. Just an FYI that there are free tools, such as Tiny Media Manager, that can rename & reorganize individual movies or entire libraries in minutes.
Technically not supported by Plex naming conventions, even though it tends to work. However, there are always times when non-standard naming/organization breaks. Follow the documentation (linked above) and it just works.
Falling back on the Shield is not impossible, but not easy. You would have to find the app for the prior version and sideload it to the Shield. Plex does not make the app available as an individual download. I’m not aware of anywhere it is available.
Suggestion: Make a test library, “Test Movies” or something similar. Name one or two of the troublesome movie per the documentation. See if the Shield recognizes it OK.
Example:
/entertainment/movies-test <-- Folder added to library
.../Robots (2023) <-- each movie in own folder
....../Robots (2023).mkv <-- movie_name (year).ext
Thanks, Ford. I tried it just as you suggested but there was no change in the behavior. I created a new folder under Entertainment, and a new folder under that one named what you suggested. I moved the problem file into it and added that path to the library. Then I scanned the library. The file showed up, but couldn’t not be matched.
It’s worth mentioning that I have more than a few files, as in quite a few, and this singular movie is exhibiting this oddity. But I also added a new TV series that is doing the same thing - matches perfectly on the WD Plex server but not identifiable on the Shield. And both were just added.
Maybe it’s Shield bug, in which case I might have to rename it with the IMDB identifier. But I’ll wait a few days and see if it resolves itself.
At least I understand why the Shield doesn’t automatically update Plex when new files are added. Thank you for that and for your efforts to resolve the matching issue.
