Hello Plex -
First, thank you for so many years of such an amazing application. I’ve recommended it to dozens of people, so I hope they all signed up.
For my question:
I’ve noticed over the last several updates that I’ll have duplicates listed for an episode which are the same filename. IE:
iles
/mnt/Music and Pics/TVShows/Lucifer/Season 3/Lucifer - S03E11 - City of Angels WEBDL-720p.mkv
/mnt/Music and Pics/TVShows/Lucifer/Season 3/Lucifer - S03E11 - City of Angels WEBDL-720p.mkv
The icon shows 2 files, however these are the same file. Even if I re-scan the library it doesn’t correct itself.
Ideas?
Additionally, for those of us who have quite large libraries (20TB in my case), is there a way to run a report in Plex which shows multiple files for an episode or movie (which are valid duplicate files for a similar show) so we can hunt them down and clean up our libraries?
Keep up the great work, and thank you so much for an amazing application.
I’ve just browsed through 30 pages of the forum and still can’t see any answers BTW. Similar issues with other users which I saw prior to my posting. I hope the above screen shots provide the detail required.
I’m not sure what’s going on at your house, but at my house things (almost) always go fine - providing…:
G:/TV Shows/ <— is my TV Show Library (for instance)
…Lucifer (2016)/
…Season 03/
…Lucifer (2016) - S03E01 - Episode Name Optional [Extra BS making my file name non-compliant goes in Brackets].xxx
If it was me… I’d Plex Dance® that show - while making the appropriate changes - explained hitherto in rather painful detail (with a suggestion):
FileBot (link in my signature) can handle that for you automatically or manually in seconds.
What FileBot can’t do is remove possible embedded metadata in the Title Field of MP4/M4V files (if you have any, or ever plan to at some point). Plex will read this info and prefer it over a perfect file name/structure, but you can combat that situation by moving Local Media Assets to the bottom of every agent list you can find. All tabs in TV Show and Movies here: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200241558-Agents
Just drag LMA to the bottom of the list and drop it. If you do have embedded metadata this will cure the issue, if you don’t it won’t matter. LMA will do what it has to from the bottom.
Renaming/restructuring is best performed OUTSIDE the library and you’ll need to write a new bundle for the show so The Plex Dance® was invented:
Thanks so much for the info Juice, I’ll take a look at this. I’m using Sonarr as you can tell, and don’t have an issue with other TV series, but I’ll look into Plex Dance. Never used it before.
Do you mount locally? I use a VPS and Google storage - and Google has the weird habit (sometimes) of reuploading a file with the same name, in the same folder… which I don’t notice but Plex sure does. I might be barking up the wrong tree here but worth a shot
@echyzowski said:
Thanks so much for the info Juice, I’ll take a look at this. I’m using Sonarr as you can tell, and don’t have an issue with other TV series, but I’ll look into Plex Dance. Never used it before.
Via some investigation - on your part - you’ll find that Sonarr can be made to do what Plex Requires. I’m a FileBot guy, but Sonarr can get the job done.
I see your TV Show Library seems to be buried inside your Music and Pics area - or something - and I can tell you that simply won’t work. A TV Show Library MUST follow the rules, pretty much to the letter (read: exactly like the letter), if you expect it to work right.
If your TV Show Library, as Plex Knows It, is unique at that location - as in NOT inside another Library - that should be fine. Fix the Names, Plex Dance, report what happens.
Hey Tony, thanks for feedback. Yes, I have a 10TB volume on my VMware server just for TV shows and Music/Pictures. I’ve got one mount point for the volume, but all TV shows are in their own subdirectory off the root, and it’s been fine for the most part until this duplicates started showing up. There’s no ext4 corruption that I can see, and no VMWare errors on the datastore - so not sure what it is. I’ll check your recommendations and get back to you. On my other 10TB volume I have my movies, which rarely show the same issue. If I delete the library in Plex and then re-add the library it seems to be fine. But it takes quite a while to scan the entire drive as you can imagine.
Appreciate your help. Party on Wayne. Party on Garth.
RESOLVED: Here’s an update everyone. Apparently it’s a CIFS issue. Came to me last night while I was having a smoke
I removed SMB1/NT1 from my WIndows Server 2016 VM, which is running my Sonarr/Jackett/CouchPotato
Now the Network connections to my Ubuntu VM, which hosts the 20TB and the Plex/PlexPy are connecting via SMB2/SMB3
Recent tests grabbing episodes and movies have been successful.
I guess something updated on my Plex Ubuntu VM which messed up the SMB1 protocol. Removing it seemed to work great.
Note: Had to use the PowerShell commands to remove the SMB CIFS 1.0
Thank you everyone for your assistance. Have a great weekend.
I’m having the issue with my Plex app on my phone and on my SHIELD. Certain movie files are shown in duplicates and also my playlists are being mixed in with my library. Everything looks fine on the web interface though. Is this happening to anyone else? It’s getting to be annoying at this point. Screenshot attached.
@“rovindrasingh@gmail.com” said:
I’m having the issue with my Plex app on my phone and on my SHIELD. Certain movie files are shown in duplicates and also my playlists are being mixed in with my library. Everything looks fine on the web interface though. Is this happening to anyone else? It’s getting to be annoying at this point. Screenshot attached.!
That’s the new Collections feature.
@“MovieFan.Plex” @ChrisAWallace Thank you guys so much for pointing this out to me. Finally can disable it and get my library back to normal. Was running into the issue with blank collections everywhere which from the FAQ seems to have something to do with some files that are in MP4 format. Thanks again!!
Was there ever a resolution to this issue for desktop server users like myself? I’m having the duplicate file issue all of a sudden on a Windows 10 PC setup. Here is the thread that I opened a few days ago:
@btmblue said:
Was there ever a resolution to this issue for desktop server users like myself? I’m having the duplicate file issue all of a sudden on a Windows 10 PC setup. Here is the thread that I opened a few days ago:
What yo have is a totally different issue. The OP in this thread was actually seeing the new collection item which made it look like there was a duplicate, but it wasn’t. I’ll look at your thread and respond there.
Can you describe what you found a little more? I am having the exact issue, but it is happening on movies, tv, and all the library content are on local, non network drives. Was yours related to a network drive? I didn’t quite follow you on it. Sorry for necro’ing an older thread, but yours is the only mention of double entries I found aside from my own latest one
Yes, it is a weird problem, and I’m assuming it is a bug in Plex. Here’s what I’m running, and what I found.
Plex running on a VMWare VM, using Ubuntu 18.04 Server Core only, with Samba and cifs-utils for local share on 20TB VMWare Datastore, showing as an iSCSI SAN for other VM’s that I have running. The only thing the Plex VM does is serve up Plex, and mount NTFS shares to other VM’s which copy media to the 2 linux mount points I have.
Other VM’s I have are Windows Server 2016 VM’s which handle uTorrent, Sonarr, Jackett and CouchPotato
The problem I ran into:
When Sonarr would find an episode of a show, it would download it, and then copy to the appropriate folder on my Plex VM (mnt/TVShows/TheArrow for instance) and then advise Plex of the updated series, which would tell Plex to download the new meta data, update the dashboard etc… Which was all good.
Then as Plex was set to “Monitor” the directory where the Movies, TV Shows and Concerts are located - it would see the new episode file, and then re-add the new file to the TV show record, creating a duplicate entry.
Work around:
I turned off the “Monitor Library Files” in Plex, and let Sonarr update the Plex Metadata. Then I refresh the library every night and I see to have resolved the issue.
