I was recently gifted seasons 8-10 of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ for Christmas, a show I already record with Plex DVR. I replaced the recordings I had of those seasons with rips of the DVD sets, but I also want to make sure that the DVR doesn’t record or replace those episodes again afterwards (because it does). I’m not sure how to do this, as I keep my recordings and the TV I own on video in separate libraries.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Hello? Anyone? Bueller?
I really need help here, guys.
Short answer is, You can’t.
Keeping them in separate libraries is the reason you are getting episodes you own recorded again. If they are all in the same library Plex will not record an episode, unless the new recording would be a higher resolution and you have the “Replace lower resolution items” option selected.
You can still have the recordings in separate folders in the library. Just add the TV Owned folder to your TV Show DVR library using the Add the other folders to the Library using the Add Folders section of the Edit Library dialog.
I had an issue when I first started using Plex where I stored recordings in a TV Show library, but recorded to a DVR library. My DVR library was setup to use an 120 GB SSD that was originally my boot drive but had been replaced by a larger 500 GB SSD. Once I changed the TV Shows library to include the SSD and changed recordings to use the TV Show library instead of DVR all of my duplicate recordings of episodes stopped. Plex could then see that already had the episode in the library so ignored it in subsequent repeats of the episode.
One other thing to add. I personally never set the Keep or Delete options of shows I setup to record. Plex keeps these settings at a show level, not show in library. So if you already own Seasons 8-10 of Big Bang Theory and you set either of these options with Season 11 now airing you could see episodes from seasons 8-10 deleted. I personally manually delete shows/episodes I no longer want on my system.
Shame. The one thing I hate to do is waste storage space. I only have 8TB of space for all my ripped media and DVR recordings (storage space is expensive!), and the day I finally run out of space will be a dark day indeed.
Maybe we could have Plex add a no-recording feature in, or have Plex count all episodes on the server instead of just the ones in a specific library. It wouldn’t be hard to implement.
