Duplicates, more and more duplicates

General Discussions
1

I have seen other forum posts on this, but none of them helpful. I have the latest plex media server running on windows 7 connected to a NAS. Everything was fine for a while, but after an upgrade a few months back many of my movies started showing up as duplicates.

I tried deleting the duplicates but it only ended up hosing me. I had to re-copy (had a backup thank goodness) all of the missing videos. I did find about 5 duplicate mp4’s, and removed them, but I don’t have any more duplicates.

I woke up today and looked at my media server and I have about twice as many duplicates now… Super annoying!

Does anybody have a true fix for this?

2

Please start by looking at the Plex media info
of a movie which shows up as having duplicates.

Best provide a screenshot of it, so we can advice your best strategy for fixing this.

3

Can you quickly check how those duplicates manifest for you?
Some users confuse inline collections with duplicates if there’s only a single item in such a collection. Inline collections should display x items or x movies below the poster and name instead of a release year.

Edit: learning of the day… don’t take ages answering a question while sitting in a subway while Otto answers stuff in parallel — too slow :face_with_thermometer:

4

example
example955×524 105 KB
info
info951×525 49.9 KB
no_info
no_info1179×424 81.5 KB

Here is an example of 3 duplicates. For one set, the info button was present on one, but not another.

5

Looks like I am seeing # movie below the “duplicates”… I am filtering by “Movie” though, and not collections

6

So mystery solved… it’s not duplicates but collections (probably automatically created)

That’s why they’re also called “inline collections” – you can use those to organize related movies (e.g. Iron Man 1-3, Tom Clancy's "Jack Ryan" or Pixar Shorts).
The support article linked above explains how you can…

  1. manage them (e.g. manually adding items to a collection)
  2. configure if Plex should automatically add collections when adding metadata (via TheMovieDb.org) – and how to disable that behavior.
  3. configure if/how Plex will display collections in your library - e.g. show collection but hide individual items from this collection, show collection and its items or don’t show inline collections (you can then still show them using the collections view)
7

For immediate relief, disable inline collections in your movie library by
Edit your library(s)
go to the ‘Advanced’ tab
set ‘Collections’ to ‘Disabled’

You might also want to do this, to ‘prettify’ your movie titles:
Go to

  • Settings - Server - Agents - Shows - TheTVDB

In there, grab the line ‘Local Media Assets’ with your mouse and drag it downwards, so it ends up being at the bottom of the stack of active agents.
Repeat the same under

  • Settings - Server - Agents - Shows - TheMovieDatabase
  • Settings - Server - Agents - Movies - Plex Movie
  • Settings - Server - Agents - Movies - TheMovieDatabase
8

I see you are using mp4 files.
If these mp4 files have embedded meta tags stored in them, they could be responsible for the automatic creation of Collections.
Make sure, that none of your movie files has content in the ‘Album’ meta tag.

You can use mp3tag to check and empty-out this tag if necessary.

9

Thanks all! I disabled collections. No longer going insane–and I now understand something I didn’t before. If I want to enable collections in the future I should be able to control them as desired. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

10

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