I get this msg. "There are no items in this library" when there is media in the folder.

After my ext. hard drive containing my Plex server stopped working I had to uninstall everything just to get back to being able to see the option to add a new server. The first new Library i went to index in this new server, which has a new name and is located on a new path, was TV. I select the folder immed. get the following msg. There are no items in this library. After trying to add other video libraries this seems to be happening for all of them whether it’s Movies or TV.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Here is the log.

[
{
“type”: “info”,
“host”: “app.plex.tv”,
“userAgent”: “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36”,
“browser”: {
“id”: “chrome”,
“name”: “Chrome”,
“version”: “58.0”,
“webkit”: true,
“platform”: “Windows”,
“platformID”: “windows”,
“platformVersion”: “10”,
“platformModifierKey”: “ctrl”
},
“version”: “3.7.0”,
“primaryServerUrl”: “https://192-168-29-128.e60fe41091154e88b2db14ab75267658.plex.direct:32400/”,
“primaryServerAuthToken”: true,
“username”: “sysopchris”,
“cloudUrl”: [
{
“scheme”: “https”,
“address”: “plex.tv”,
“uri”: “https://plex.tv”,
“testState”: “connected”,
“isBundled”: false,
“isFallback”: false,
“relay”: false,
“isPossiblyCrossNetworkProtected”: false,
“isUntested”: false,
“isPending”: false,
“isConnected”: true,
“isUnauthorized”: false,
“isUnavailable”: false,
“isFailed”: false,
“isAborted”: false,
“isLoopback”: false,
“isPrivate”: false,
“isHttps”: true,
“isSecure”: true,
“isPlexDirect”: false,
“currentTest”: null,
“sources”: [
{
“id”: “internal”
}
]
}
],
“cloudAccessToken”: true
}
]

See attached screenshot for my system specs.

When I select “Update Library” for one of these libs. this msg. shows up at the bottom of the screen. Since nothing is happening it’d not accurate.

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201543057-Why-is-some-of-my-content-not-found-

This log file is not from the server.

  1. activate debug logging (not ‘verbose’!)
  2. quit Plex Server
  3. wait 1 minute
  4. start Plex Server
  5. wait 2 minutes
  6. either refresh one movie or add one movie into your library
  7. wait 3 minutes
  8. fetch log files and attach them here

Thank you for your help & time.

I ended Plex Server in Task Manager, waited, restarted, waited and added a video file which was never on the previous server.

I’m really looking forward to getting this working. I’ve got 30TB dedicated videos & music at the moment.

What kind of drive is I: ? (must not be a networked file share. It should be an internal hard drive.)
What filesystem is it formatted with? (Must be NTFS)

Your files are not organised like the are supposed to.
Folder structure and file names matter. Now even more, since a crucial search API was shutdown by Google, so non-conforming file names cannot be looked up anymore.
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200220687-Naming-Series-Season-Based-TV-Shows

This is info. from Paragon about that drive.


Sorry for the delays in getting back to you. My grand-daughter has come to spend the weekend with me and my time has been all allocated to her today. She’s 8.
I find it odd that the not only the 1st time I created a server using files from my E: and I: drives there was not a problem and there have been no changes since then. Actually I have tried adding adding files to this server from more than 2 drives and get the same results.

So far I have only only been trying to add videos. Just now to see what would happen I added an audio folder from another drive and and everything behaved as expected.


Here’s the screenshot.

Drive I: appears to be alright.

This is another drive I am having trouble with.


Maybe I should not not have said it’s another dive I am “having trouble with” but just another drive that contains videos I am unable to add as an library.

@sysopchris said:
This is another drive I am having trouble with.

These screenshots don’t help with your issue.
Problem source No. 1 is bad file naming. Double so when it comes to tv shows.

Did these drives work before on this computer?
Did you re-install Windows in this computer, thereby erasing all data from the system drive?
Can you play any of the videos in this drive directly - e.g. using VLC or such?

In addition to making sure you name and structure your media in a way Plex can recognize, which was already pointed out by OttoKerner, you need to make sure to create libraries that match the media. I see in the scanner log, the movie library is scanning TV Show episodes.

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200288926-Creating-Libraries

I also noticed the your names and caution you to not have Plex monitor a location that is being downloaded to. You need to fix the naming of those types of files first.

I use FileBot to automatically rename my files, create the proper folder structure and move the files into the proper locations.

Everything works perfectly. The only thing re-installed was Plex Media Server. The drive that I had the problem with contained the previous Plex server and my movies. Strangely enough it works fine on all my other Windows systems. All of the other drives have been on this desktop more than a year each and I see nothing abnormal with any of them. After I had the problem with the other drive I checked all my drives with CHKDSK and had no errors. I had thought maybe the problem with with the previous server was that the server folder contained 1.4 million files. It took a full day to delete them all once I connected it to my laptop. I haven’t brought it back to the desktop to see it can be recognized again. No software would recognize it and I’m pretty good at restoring bad drives.

As soon as I have more time I’ll check into Filebot but renaming my files does not explain why the previous server was Ok with all of my file & directory names for videos.

@sysopchris said:
As soon as I have more time I’ll check into Filebot but renaming my files does not explain why the previous server was Ok with all of my file & directory names for videos.

I mentioned it in my second post. There is no “airbag” for bad filenames anymore.

I only installed Plex for the first time ever 2 weeks ago. So when you say ‘anymore’ surely you are not talking about such a short time frame.

Two weeks ago these folders were no problem at all. During that time I have not changed version of the server or modified the folders.