I had done an install of Plex Server on a new install Windows 10 on an Intel NUC. I had migrated my plex library metadata from a Synology NAS (old plex server) to the Windows 10 machine (new plex server), with pretty good results. Only a few movies, of the 1000+ I have, needed to be edited. The movies are still physically located on the NAS and the Win 10 Plex Server is reading the files via mapped drive location. I had never had thumbnail generation on when the server was running on the NAS.
On the new server I have enabled it in the server settings. Then I went to each of my libraries, pressed the Delete thumbnails button, unchecked the enable thumbnails and pressed saved changes. Then went back in re-checked enable thumbnails, saved changes, then clicked Analyze. It showed it went through the analysis movie by movie. When I check for thumbnails using either the web client or my iOS client, nothing shows. Also when I check the folder C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\Thumbnails, it’s empty, except for a Genre folder which is also empty. Folder Properties shows 0 bytes on the folder.
Thumb don’t generate immediately when you analyze several items at once (or even whole libraries).
This only works on single items.
But you don’t need to do it yourself anyway: Thumbs are also filled in during server maintenance hours. The Butler starts with the newest items and works its way backwards.
Well that’s good to know, but I have had this setup for almost a month now (01/27/17), with the settings enabled and still no thumbnails. Shouldn’t that thumbnails folder have a few Megabytes by now?
I went to each library and deleted and reset everything (as described in the first post) only last night. So I’m going to set a maintenance schedule for all day today and see what happens, then will report back.
This folder doesn’t exist in a regular Plex installation: C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\Thumbnails
However it got there, it was not created by Plex.
Video preview thumbnails have the filename extension .bif and are located in the metadata bundle, together with other files, like posters or automatically downloaded subtitles.
Those metadata bundles are stored under C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\Media\localhost
That folder wasn’t created by me or anything else.
There’s only Windows 10, TeamViewer (headless system) and Plex installed on this thing, nothing else.
The only folder I copied over from the Synology was this:
/Volume1/Plex/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/
To Windows:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Plex Media Server
I followed the advice from this thread:
So if that’s some weird folder that wasn’t supposed to be created, but was, either way it’s the wrong folder I have been chasing.
So looking at C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\Media\localhost, there’s about 51 *.bif files and growing. So I’m guessing Plex is populating it as we speak.
And I just checked for thumbnails through the Web App, and they are now showing. Wow!
I just had to schedule maintenance now, like you advised, and it got started. Maintenance was scheduled previously but it wasn’t doing it. So I’m wondering if the process of deleting the thumbnails (even though they didn’t exist) then re-enabling and then scheduling it kickstarted the process again.
Not sure, but it seems to be working finally. Thank you.
Creating those is a very comupting intensive task. 34 movies might be all it managed to finish during the maintenance time window.
It will continue next day. Wait another night and count again.
Since my post on (02/21) I had set the maintenance time from 7am to 2am, for 19 hours of maintenance time. From that time until today It hasn’t progressed at all.
So the 35th movie was American Gangster (2007), I saw it in Plex Media Scanner Analysis.3.log
That one wasn’t generating thumbnails and still isn’t.
But then I just noticed one new movie, when I was scanning the logs. Not in any sequence.
Logan (2017), which has generated thumbnails. Plex Media Scanner Analysis.2.log
So maybe it is getting stuck and skipping certain movies.
The order is from newest to oldest added.
So if you add a new movie, it will get the preview thumbs. But as the Butler progresses to the older movies, it may get stuck on an older file.
@swsquish said:
do you see if that is happening on any of the files?
One can only see that indirectly.
If there is a message about the plex transcoder processing one movie, but after that there are no messages about other movies being processed, one can assume that the last movie may have caused a crash.
Is there a way to make the Butler skip those files?
Not that I know of. You might want to remove this movie temporarily and see if the preview generation now advances further.
If you have identifies such a bad file, I’d like to get it to the developers for analysis (and hopefully fixing the bug that caused the crash).
I didn’t see anything causing it to crash in the log files. I don’t know if you had a chance to look over them? Did you see any abnormalities in the scanner logs?
Also, I have hit the analyze button for that movie American Gangster repeatedly and still no thumbnails. I am assuming Plex is having a problem with it. How would I send it to the developers for analysis? It’s a 12gb file.
Hi sorry for the long delay.
Attached the XML for that file.
This thumbnail thing is still sporadic and still hasn’t done the whole library, for over a month now. I am at a loss how to get this to complete. Did you see any errors or stops in the scan logs I attached?
OK, I hoped it was an AVI file (because those cause the biggest issues), but it’s a very regular MKV file.
You could try to remux the file.
(This process won’t affect the quality of the file at all.)
download MKVtoolnixGUI
install it
drag your original file into it
press ‘Start Multiplexing’
then put the remuxed file into your library and see what happens.
Did you see any errors or stops in the scan logs I attached?
