Windows has long has a 260-char limit on total path lengths. While this is disableable on Win7 Home via the registry and Pro/Enterprise via Group Policy, Win7 is out of luck. Unfortunately the Plex DVR (at least as of a few wks ago) does not appear to sanitize path length when recording, and just writes it out willy-nilly. The result is that the data gets saved, but is rendered inaccessible to Windows and thus to Plex itself. This happened to me several times when recording one-off events or specials off of PBS, CSPAN, and public access. They’ll have very long show names, and then the show name will be repeated in the filename itself. Sometimes the episode name will be the same as the showname, too, so you’ll have the same incredibly long title saved within the file-system for no good reason. Ofc, these dubious aesthetics wouldn’t matter were the file still accessible, but it isn’t, not without renaming the show folder to something shorter (and possibly the show as well, depending on how long.).
Pls (if you haven’t already, see below) implement a check for systems that have this limitation. It will be there by default even on modern Windows (…incredibly). This could be done as a simple truncation of the title, by omitting the title from the file itself, or some combination thereof, whatever y’all think works best.
Note that I’m not actually sure that this is still a problem as i have not attempted to record a one-off of this kind in a few weeks. That’s why I haven’t specified a version here–I’m not sure under which version I’ve observed this behavior. If this has already been fixed, then thank you! And either way, thanks for listening.
