How to start over

General Discussions
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I apologize in advance for asking questions I should know the answers to by now.
I’ve been away from Plex for a period of time - trying to get everything organized again.
New PC, new SSD drives in the PC, media collection still on external HDD’s.

I know I should move all my movies into another folder on my 5T external drive and start from there - is there a tip and trick to that or is it a one at a time thing?

I have movies showing on the Plex server that complain about not being mounted - but everything is mounted. I am not sure how to see where the movie library is looking for the movie.

I have three movie libraries showing - I want to move everything into one.
Should I buy another external drive, this time SSD and move them there? (any recommendations on size or brand? I don’t have a ton of movies, wish I did, 527 showing, but I think that is counting the “1 Movie” thumbnail)

Or can I create a “Media Folder” on my 5T external and nest each movie folder under “Media” and have Plex only look in that main folder for the movie content. (Do I need to rename everything to get rid of the title having underscores between words and in some cases “.Title XX”)

When I got back to using Plex, yesterday, I ended up with thumbnails from iPhone images - not even sure how that happened, I see the movies, in many cases two of the same title, the movie has a date under it, the duplicate has “1 Movie” under it. Don’t know why or how to get rid of the “1 Movie” thumbnails.

In the past I have edited every title to get from MY_NEW_MOVIE.Title1 to be just the name of the movie, but I can see I have to do that all over again in many cases.

Using the Plex app on my TV I can connect but I see a ton of images mixed in with the movie thumbnails.

I can “cast” movies from my PC, but often the audio is out of sync.

I use DVDFab to rip my media - tell me I don’t have to start over.

So, basically, what is the best course of action to get all my movie files into one place, get rid of the three libraries and start over? Hopefully all these crazy pictures won’t show up again and I can resolve the “drive not mounted” thing and I’m still not sure about the error message on the TV about “Conversion Failed The transcoder exited due to an error”. This makes me go the closet and find the DVD of the title I wanted to watch - defeats the purpose.

I apologize for my naivety - please point me in the right direction. I need to start over, but the right way and only once - I hope. I probably missed the “How to start over for dummies” topic somewhere.

Thank you.

2

Most likely your external drive now has a different drive letter than it had when you created the library.
You can look at the Plex media info of any item, to see at which location Plex is expecting it to reside.

Not sure what you mean. You should definitely have a folder with your movies.
And another folder beside it with your tv shows.
And yet another folder beside the others with all your music.
Never place any media directly into the ‘root’ folder of a drive letter.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/categories/your-media/

If you use external drives (particularly when you are juggling with several ones), make sure that the same drive gets always the same drive letter.
This should solve the ‘drive not mounted issue’: https://www.howtogeek.com/96298/assign-a-static-drive-letter-to-a-usb-drive-in-windows-7/

Simply remove the 2nd and 3rd movie library.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200289286-deleting-libraries/

If you have several folders or drives with movies in there, edit your only ‘Movies’ library in Plex, go to the ‘Add Folders’ tab and add the path to the additional drive.
But don’t add each movie individually!
While you are there, make sure that every path listed in there is pointing to a location that is still existant, accessible, and not completely empty.

This should not be necessary. However, you must make sure that Plex can recognize which movie it is, in order to download proper posters and mother metadata.
Again, see https://support.plex.tv/articles/categories/your-media/

The “.Title XX” issue is solved by either
Getting rid of any embedded metadata in your mp4/m4v files (mp3tag, among others, can do this)
or
Performing this configuration change in Plex:
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

What you are seeing are Collections, which get created automatically.
There are two sources for these automatic Collections:

  • TheMovieDatabase:
    switch off ‘Use collection info from The Movie Database’ in the properties of your movie library (‘Advanced’ tab, scroll all the way down)
  • Embedded meta tags in your mp4/m4v files:
    remove all content from the ‘Album’ field with mp3tag. You must do this before adding movies to your movie library.

Not sure what you mean here. Please make a screenshot.

This software is known to embed a ton of useless/wrong metadata, which affects how these videos appear in Plex. Your best course is to remove these meta data before adding the files into Plex. See above.

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