Under Agents > Artists, I have set Local Media Assets (Artists) Settings to /Public/Shared Videos/Music Videos.
I have, for example, the video of “The Big Sky” from the Kate Bush album Hounds of Love as an avi file.
The album itself is in /Public/Shared Music/Bush, Kate/1985 Hounds of Love/ where the song is 03 The Big Sky.mp3. The same track also appears in other places, such as her compilation album, The Whole Story.
Where should I put the video and how should I name it to get it to show up? How and where should it appear? Am I right in thinking that it should appear on the Music page for the album?
I greatly enjoy Plex (and have the Lifetime Pass), but I’m still not grokking this.
By the way (and you don’t need to do this now - I don’t need it), the version you gave for Server Version is actually the version of Plex Web. The Server version can be found farther down:
Thanks for the detailed info. So now I’ve made sure that I have a library of type “Other Video” set to my Music Videos folder. The library shows up in my sidebar.
I have renamed the video, in that Music Videos folder, “Kate Bush - The Big Sky-video.avi” (and renamed my other Kate Bush videos accordingly). Going back to my Kate Bush artist folder, the videos aren’t showing up. I don’t see an Extras area. (I do have that working for Movies, for what that’s worth.) Also, the Similar Artists area keeps disappearing and redrawing itself.
The “Other Video” library is not needed to have the videos show up in your Music library. “Other Video” library allows you to have the videos in a library independent of the music files.
Did you do a “Refresh Metadata” on the Kate Bush artist after making the changes?
Yup, I did do a Refresh Metadata. I suspect that, since the Similar Artists are still blinking in and out of existence, It may still be going through my library finding them, and might get the to Extras after that. Plex tells me that I have 3735 artists in nearly 2 TB of music on a slightly antiquated NAS, so it may still be crawling through them.
Does having the Other Video library get in the way of their showing up with the Music artists?
Until you figure this out, you don’t need to ‘refresh metadata’ on the entire library every time. You can just do it on the artist you’re working on.
No. It’s completely irrelevant. One question about it, though: Do the videos appear in it? I mean, did Plex find the videos when you created the “Other Videos” library?
Okay, good. When you mentioned that the files are on an NAS, I began to suspect a permissions issue, because most NAS’s that I’m aware of use some flavor of the linux operating system, and it’s common for file permissions to get in the way. But if Plex saw the files, that’s not the issue.
I just noticed, your artist folder is “Bush, Kate.” I wonder if that’s the problem. Try either renaming this folder to “Kate Bush” or renaming the video file with “Bush, Kate…” and see what happens.
Ah! Interesting. I’m not likely to rename my artist folders (I have them in proper alphabetical order, despite the nonsense that iTunes foisted upon us – old Record Store Guy methods die hard) but I could certainly try renaming the videos. As it now stands, my Music Video collection only has about 400 items, though if I get everything working, I may do some reconsidering of what belongs under Music Videos and what belongs under Movies.
Meanwhile, 14 hours after I started, the Artist page is still acting weirdly drawing and erasing the Similar Artists. Maybe this will help that, too.
I’ve changed the video names as you suggested, to match the name of the Music Artist folder. It didn’t change. (I left one video name unchanged as a test.)
Looking at artists whose name isn’t changed in the folder names (such as Pink Floyd and Eminem), I see that they are behaving the same way, with the Similar Artists disappearing and reappearing, and the videos not appearing.
However, looking at my alerts, it looks like Plex is in an endless loop scanning my Music Videos, restarting, listing the same folders in the alerts, claiming to have finished, then starting again. This loop is taking less than a minute each time. Any ideas? googling for what to do hasn’t brought up anything that I understand (which may be because so much of what’s online is about old versions.)
I got nothing on why it’s looping. You can try restarting the Plex Server and refreshing again. Beyond, that, I’d suggest grabbing the Plex log files and post them for one of the ninjas to look at.
