Adding a specific movie to my library provokes a processing loop

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Server Version#: 1.13.5.5332

A specific movie that I’m trying to add to my library, 1963’s “X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes” directed by Roger Corman, is provoking some sort of refresh loop in my Plex Media Server. As soon as the media files are added, the usual spinning glyph is visible in the Web client, and after a short time the movie details appear (director, writer, cast. etc.)

But the movie poster never appears, the spinning never stops, and at the foot of the page “Finished processing X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes” is endlessly repeated in a loop. In addition the “Related Movies” thumbnails above it are in constant motion, shuffling images back and forth.

Moving the files out and emptying the Trash stops it, but putting the files back provokes the same behavior every time.

If I “Unmatch”, the loop stops, but then there’s no metadata. I can add some of it back manually but there’s no way in Plex to add a lot of it (such as cast and crew details). If I “Match” again and choose the 1963 movie, the loop recurs.

Interestingly, The Movie Database has an entry for another movie with this same identical title, but with no release date. (It’s a planned remake of the Corman original that hasn’t been completed.)

I’m wondering whether that data anomaly is provoking this (seems like a bug in Plex).

I’ve considered going in and adding an arbitrary future release date in TMDB for the remake, to see whether that makes the Plex problem go away. But I’m reluctant to tamper with it, plus I believe Plex caches the data from TMDB for some length of time anyway, so it could be some time before any change becomes visible.

Suggestions for troubleshooting further, or for a workaround (even a kludgy one) are solicited.

Thanks.

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Try naming that movie
“X - The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) (tt0057693).mp4”
Of course the extension should match your file.

The second number in parenthesis is the IMDB identifier for that movie and it seems that everything works better for me when it is included.

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I didn’t know that adding the IMDB identifier was even an option, thanks.

But unfortunately the behavior is the same even with the identifier added.

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It could be due to metadata in the MP4 file. Maybe try remuxing it into an MKV.

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Thanks, but it already is an MKV (that’s almost the only format I use for video).

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Oh, dear. It’s more serious than I thought. This is now happening with EVERY new movie that I add to Plex. Never-ending processing loop until I “Unmatch” the new addition. So until I fix this I can’t use metadata for any new movies I add.

Some database corruption perhaps? Some unintentionally misconfigured setting? I really have no idea.

How should I tackle this? Is there some way to rebuild the DB? Some specific setting I should suspect?

Thank you in advance for any community help with this.

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Some additional information. I created a Movies library on a separate (remote) Plex server and added one of the problematic movies to the new library. It works fine there, no processing loop.

So the problem seems to be specific to my own library here.

On my local library I remuxed the mkv into an mp4 but the processing loop still occurs.

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I’m still having this issue and it’s very troublesome. It seems that half the movies that I add to Plex now exhibit this behavior. Plex performs a match and identifies the movie but then the processing loop never completes.

This is a screen capture of the behavior when I drop a new movie into an otherwise empty Movies library:

Yet when I drop this same movie into a library on a different (remote) Plex server, it all works fine.

So it would seem to be something peculiar to my local installation, perhaps some misconfiguration. I’ve tried copying the Agents configuration from the working server to the misbehaving server but the problem persists.

Currently the only way I can get these movies into my local Plex library is to Unmatch them and then manually add all the metadata, which is tedious and which also means that I get no cast details because Plex doesn’t allow that data to be added manually.

Can anyone please suggest a workaround, or some possible/likely misconfiguration that could account for this?

Thanks.

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