Help! re-scan of movie folder showing assets (subtitles, nfo's, jpg's) as movies!

General Discussions
1

I feel like I’m drowning.

I had two external USB HDDs that reported as dying about a week ago. Managed to hock my soul to afford four new 8 TB drives, went through the nightmare of trying to salvage my data… managed to get it all, but holy crap what an ordeal…had to constantly tap on one of the drives, taken out of the case, with a screwdriver to keep the platters spinning… for hours. And hours. And hours.

After a week of spending every free moment, and a good portion of the hours I should have been sleeping, all of my media is on the new drives, sorted, organized and named. I had my Plex server shut down from the time I got the warning about the drives until last night, when I had everything ready on the new drives, connected and running. I started my Plex server up, and changed the directories for the movies, tv shows and music to point at the new drives. There was an update offered, so I updated the server. I started a library scan, and left it overnight to do it’s thing.

This morning I woke to an absolute mess. Plex is telling me that i have about a thousand more movies than I actually have. It is showing duplicates of movies where I do not have duplicates- not stacked (where I would have to ‘split apart’), but two posters with the exact same name… the second (and sometimes third) copy are the local asset files for the movies (sub, srt, idx, jpg, nfo, etc.)

I can’t find any way to get it to stop doing this. If I remove the errant entry from the library, it immediately rescans and finds it again. I do not want to delete all of my meticulously preened local assets, but I can’t figure out why Plex is thinking that every file in the movie folder is a movie, even if it has a non-movie extension.

I thought that maybe there was corruption on the drive or in the data for the files, but neither are the case. I scanned the drives on my windows 10 pc and on my mac and found no errors. I added new files from the internet (movie.mkv, movie.jpg, movie.srt) and wrote out an nfo file using text edit. After I added them Plex did a library scan and showed them as separate movies with the same name (in this case it ignored the nfo file… it isn’t consistent at all with which files it is adding.)

I am at a loss. I’m not a total novice, but I’m not a hardened pro either. This one is beyond me. I have considered deleting the database etc. from Plex and starting over, but am worried that after 4 days of scanning I am going to be in the same boat.

Any help?

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I found this post as I’m having pretty much the same issue and today is the day I decided to tackle it. I’ve named my movie files as recommended but I seem to have duplicates (one will have the year and poster info though the poster is always wrong) the other will say 1 movie. deleting the duplicate will delete the movie file.

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3

Collections Maybe???
Try turning show collections off for your libraries…
Just a guess

4

@bhaughee - Yes that is exactly the issue I am having. Not sure if it was the update or the fact that all of my media files have been relocated, but my library went from pristine and perfectly organized to a complete disaster as a result of one of those two factors.

@jjrjr1 - when I fist noticed the issue (while things were still scanning/scraping) i poked around a bit and found the collections setting, and disabled collections in each of the relevant sections in my library. Didn’t resolve the issue.

I tried deleting assets from the folder and this seems to have no effect. However, if I delete then through the plex server via the browser that seems to remove them, but also removes the asset from my drive.

I also noticed in my television section that all of the episodes of the shows I have play without issue, but also show the red ‘unavailable’ button, which I find odd… (if unavailable, how am I watching it?)

I’m likely doing something wrong… wish I could figure out what it is.

5

Not sure what Plex Version you are running.
When I first had the issue I also could not shut Collections off.
It was a bug in PMS and I think fixed on current version.

What I did was just delete the collections instead… No media assets were touched.

Not too sure what is happening to you.

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@bhaughee said:
I found this post as I’m having pretty much the same issue and today is the day I decided to tackle it. I’ve named my movie files as recommended but I seem to have duplicates (one will have the year and poster info though the poster is always wrong) the other will say 1 movie. deleting the duplicate will delete the movie file.

This is just the collections feature.
Disable them to return to the old behaviour.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201273953-collections/

7

@qpisces said:
I feel like I’m drowning.

Edit the library, go to the ‘Advanced’ tab
What is selected for ‘Scanner’ and ‘Agent’ ?
Scanner should be ‘Plex Movie Scanner’
Agent should be either ‘Plex Movie’ or ‘TheMovieDatabase’