I am guessing the issue is more with Netdrive than Plex. I notice that when using Netdrive connected to Google Drive. When doing a plex library scan, the scan doesn’t pick up all the folders the first time, then when redoing the scan a second time it will pick up folders it didn’t scan in the first time, but it will also delete some of the other movies that it picked up originally in the library. All the movies are in accordance to the Plex naming policy. Anyone else that uses Netdrive have this issue?
I am having major issues right now trying to scan my Plex library through Netdrive. I have been using Amazon Cloud Drive and Netdrive together for close to a year now, then streaming the content using Plex, and would say that it has worked very well…until now.
Everytime I try to scan in my library it just deletes all video files (when viewing through netdrive), it’s very strange. I have two PCs. My Plex server, and my personal PC. After the issue when scanning media through Plex and the files disappear on netdrive, I can still see the video files on my personal computer, so my conclusion is something that netdrive has implemented/or Amazon has that has disabled viewing of all video formats so Plex cannot scan in the media.
I have just setup Windows Server 2008R2 on a VPS using NetDrive. It took quite a while to do initial scan and add my 1000 movies. I am using Google Drive and playback has been good. It takes just a bit of time for NetDrive to pull file from Google so playback takes a bit to start. But once NetDrive cache gets a lot of the file playback is smooth.
I have been looking into switching from the default “Plex Movie Scanner” to the “Plex Videos Files Scanner” since its scan is supposed to be more generic. Scanning takes a long time since a part of each movie file has to be downloaded from your cloud provider during scan.
Wish someone could code up a scanner that would simply match based on the filename. I think that would work better for us using NetDrive, acd_cli or other methods of mounting a virtual drive for Plex to read.
Or even better if Plex would support cloud storage in a better way. I mean most of my files are H264 and can be directed played. How cool would it be if Plex could just point your player at the file directly on your cloud provider instead of pushing it all through PMS.
Just wanted to give an update on the situation… I believe "files were being removed from the library was actually from the Netdrive program itself. Not to long after i made the original post, they released an update which has fixed the problem of files disappearing.
I have been using Netdrive and finally have it working where i am happy with it and plays great.
First of all, the setup…
I have 1 library setup with a TV Shows section and a Movies section. Each section contains 2 folders. The format is like this.
Google Drive
–Media
– TV Series
– TV Series (Recently Added)
– Movies
– Movies (Recently Added)
Due to the large library, having everything done with one scan at once, will cause a very long scan, which isnt good. So i ended up creating 2 scripts that will run at different times to scan the library.
1st script - will scan the Recently Added TV Shows and Recently Added Movies Folders every 2 hours. - because of these folders only having new shows and movies that were just added this keeps the scan very short. Just remember though the more shows and movies put in the folders the longer the scans will be, so make sure you eventually move the files from the recently added folders to the TV Series/Movies folders.
2nd script - will scan the main Movie and TV Series folder every 7 days. I run this at a 7 day scan because normally no new shows or movies should be going into these 2 folders, except for when you move files from the recently added movies/tv series folders to these folders. Which doesn’t occur too often… doing a 7 day scan is good, this scan still takes a long time, in my case several hours, but it only does it once every 7 days so i can live with that. You can of course adjust the timer accordingly.
Netdrive is using Google Drive as G:
It will first try and locate the drive, if the drive is found it continues the scan. It the drive is not found, it halts, preventing your library from being deleted from plex.
also make sure you check out
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201242707-Plex-Media-Scanner-via-Command-Line
you will need to use the command line to figure out what section # your libraries are. In my case my TV Series is section 8 and Movies are section 9.
example of my script file i use…
Script 1:
@IF EXIST G:\ (GOTO cont1)
@ECHO Google Drive Folder for Plex not found… This program will now exit.
timeout /t 5
@GOTO end
:cont1
@ECHO Google Drive Folder for Plex was found, continuing the scan! This scan is for recently added Movies and TV Shows and occures every 2 hours.
timeout /t 5
cd /d E:\Plex
“Plex Media Scanner.exe” --verbose --scan --refresh --section 8 --directory “G:\Media\TV Series (Recently Added)”
“Plex Media Scanner.exe” --verbose --scan --refresh --section 9 --directory “G:\Media\Movies (Recently Added)”
timeout /t 5
@GOTO end
:end
Same as above, the script checks to make sure the drive is attached and working, then performs the section scans. Also this scan will include the recently added folders too as it scans the whole section and not just the directories…
Script 2:
@IF EXIST G:\ (GOTO cont1)
@ECHO Google Drive Folder for Plex not found… This program will now exit.
timeout /t 5
@GOTO end
:cont1
@ECHO Google Drive Folder for Plex was found, continuing the scan! This scan is for Movies and TV Shows and occurs every 7 days.
timeout /t 5
cd /d E:\Plex
“Plex Media Scanner.exe” --verbose --scan --refresh --section 8
“Plex Media Scanner.exe” --verbose --scan --refresh --section 9
timeout /t 5
@GOTO end
:end
I also setup the tasks scheduler in windows with 2 tasks that point to these 2 scripts and have one run every 2 hours and the other script run every 7 days.
So far everything has been working great with no issues!
Another thing I have found is that if you make sure none of your metadata agents us “Local Media Assets” it improves the speed of scanning. I guess since Plex isn’t having to dig down into the file which takes more effort on a virtual drive mount with NetDrive.
So close I can taste it!! My setup of using NetDrive mounting Google Drive unlimited account with about 4tb of content on a low power VPS server running Server 2008R2 ($7 a month) is so close to working perfectly. But I am getting some bad shuttering on initial start of any content.
So being my server is low powered I try to direct play/direct stream as much as possible to my clients. This is good because my VPS connection is fast, seems to test around 100mbps coming in and 150mbps going out since it is geared for hosting stuff.
Problem is NetDrive has a ramp up time to full speed when it is pulling a video file from my Google Drive to my PMS on the VPS. So PMS thinks media is on a fast hard drive ready to direct play/direct stream. So when a client starts playback PMS runs out of data to stream and shuttering playback for around 10-30 seconds. Depending on file size.
After that initial period NetDrive has locally cached a lot of the media file and is pulling in data at around a steady 6MB/sec, way more than enough for even a large video file to stream smoothly.
How I know this is the issue is for two reasons. First if I play the same video file in succession it works perfectly since NetDrive has it in a cache folder on the local storage. Second if I disable direct play and force transcode initial playback takes much longer but works better presumably because PMS is caching much more of the unconverted original file to feed the transcoder.
But clearly transcoding to several clients is a bad solution with a lower power server. So is there any way to basically tell Plex to cache more data on direct play/direct stream server side before sending it to a client?!
I love lots of things about Plex but it seems they basically assume only one use case, everyone is going to have a very powerful server, with tons of storage attached to an internet connection with tons of upload bandwidth. With the later being the biggest obstacle. Most residential internet has very limited upload bandwidth.
I really want to make this work for me and a few family and friends without investing in a very high cost server or fiber to my home. I can’t be the only one with this goal in mind. ::sigh::
I am hoping for some input from others??
Just wanted to get an update on how things were running with your setup. Have you changed anything since the last time you posted? I know its been a few months.
@Chris Teasdale said:
So close I can taste it!! My setup of using NetDrive mounting Google Drive unlimited account with about 4tb of content on a low power VPS server running Server 2008R2 ($7 a month) is so close to working perfectly. But I am getting some bad shuttering on initial start of any content.So being my server is low powered I try to direct play/direct stream as much as possible to my clients. This is good because my VPS connection is fast, seems to test around 100mbps coming in and 150mbps going out since it is geared for hosting stuff.
Problem is NetDrive has a ramp up time to full speed when it is pulling a video file from my Google Drive to my PMS on the VPS. So PMS thinks media is on a fast hard drive ready to direct play/direct stream. So when a client starts playback PMS runs out of data to stream and shuttering playback for around 10-30 seconds. Depending on file size.
After that initial period NetDrive has locally cached a lot of the media file and is pulling in data at around a steady 6MB/sec, way more than enough for even a large video file to stream smoothly.
How I know this is the issue is for two reasons. First if I play the same video file in succession it works perfectly since NetDrive has it in a cache folder on the local storage. Second if I disable direct play and force transcode initial playback takes much longer but works better presumably because PMS is caching much more of the unconverted original file to feed the transcoder.
But clearly transcoding to several clients is a bad solution with a lower power server. So is there any way to basically tell Plex to cache more data on direct play/direct stream server side before sending it to a client?!
I love lots of things about Plex but it seems they basically assume only one use case, everyone is going to have a very powerful server, with tons of storage attached to an internet connection with tons of upload bandwidth. With the later being the biggest obstacle. Most residential internet has very limited upload bandwidth.
I really want to make this work for me and a few family and friends without investing in a very high cost server or fiber to my home. I can’t be the only one with this goal in mind. ::sigh::
I am hoping for some input from others??
I am using Plex Media Server v1.13.8.5395, NetDrive3 v3.6.571, Dropbox v59.4.93 on Windows 10 Pro 64-bit v1803 build 17134.345 and I have no problems with any of the compatible devices (including my Roku Ultra) on my home Wi-Fi network. I can heartily recommend this setup at this time.
