Libraries won't load (says it's empty). Restarting PMS fixes things for a few hours

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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Server Version#: 1.21.1.3830 (Synology DS920+) - DSM 6.2.3-25426 Update 3
Player Version#: 4.47.3 (Web Player). I also access PMS sometimes through a Roku/NVIDIA Shield as well; not sure if these versions are different.

Issues I’ve observed:

  • When attempting to load a library, if it doesn’t say it’s empty then it says “There was an unexpected error loading this library.”
  • Optimizing the database usually help speed things up previously but now it doesn’t seem to do much at all. In some cases, I still have to restart PMS after optimizing for libraries to load but as I mentioned in the title, this only lasts for a few hours max before “breaking” again.
  • When things are working normally again, sometimes when watching a show with subtitles, the subtitles would stop appearing and I have to to turn it off and on again. Sometimes the video will just stop altogether with a pop-up that reads “There was an unexpected error during playback. Please visit our forums if you continue to experience problems.” This is when I would either attempt to restart the video or reload PMS.

Some things I’ve tried:

  • Restarting PMS
  • Optimizing the database (many times; and also before/after restarting PMS)
  • Cleaning bundles
  • Deleting the .db-wal and .db-shm files in /Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Databases/ and reloading PMS
  • Turned off Remote Access
  • Turned off ‘Scan my library automatically’
  • Also maybe worth noting is the last thing I remember doing before PMS started acting up was creating .plexignore files in a few library directories

The attached log files were downloaded from the ‘Troubleshooting’ page:
(File removed)

EDIT: Here are another set of logs where the video playback just stopped abruptly with an error that reads “There was an unexpected error during playback. Please visit our forums if you continue to experience problems.”
(File removed)

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Interesting. It usually tells me when it’s detecting intros in the top-right corner under ‘Activity’… I saw zero activity.

I’ll look into purchasing FileBot… I tried the last known free version of it previously but it kept failing. I didn’t think the file naming would cause such a problem considering that the media still shows up accurately in Plex. EDIT2: Upon closer inspection, I was wrong here; some episodes are missing :stuck_out_tongue:

I also stumbled on that Repair Database document previously but didn’t end up running any of the commands listed there as I also stumbled on these instructions (tailored for Plex on Synology): Synology FAQ - Questions, Answers, and a few How-To's - #23 by ChuckPa - I’ll SSH into my Synology and try those commands tonight.

EDIT: I executed the four commands to check for corruption and the final command came up OK

/volume1/Multimedia/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Databases$ > sqlite3 com.plexapp.plugins.library.db “PRAGMA integrity_check”
ok

I have some guests over right now watching movies on my PMS (seems to be working fine for them right now - thankfully). I’m assuming that when I execute the repair commands, it might affect their viewing experience? So I’ll hold off on that for now… unless of course you reply back that it won’t impact them.

Thanks for looking at the logs - I look forward to seeing whether or not there’s anything else that needs remediating.

6

I finished the steps for the repairing the database this morning. PMS seemed snappier upon restart, however, video playback stopped abruptly 10-15 minutes into watching a show (“There was an unexpected error during playback. Please visit our forums if you continue to experience problems.”)

I haven’t run into an issue with libraries failing to load… yet. EDIT: I ran into the issue a couple times now but refreshing the page loads it right up. Usually it would sit there thinking for a while before failing to refresh. I suppose that’s good…

(File removed)

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I don’t think it’s the file itself because normally when the issue is persistent, we just open the file directly in Windows and play it with VLC/PotPlayer. I’ll try switching using the Plex for Windows client instead of the web client; we’ll see if that helps.

In other news, no one in my house has reported any issues using the Plex app via FireStick/Roku/NVIDIA Shield yet.

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The issue came back today but this time just for my ‘TV Shows’ library: This library is currently empty). The issue occurs on both the Plex for Windows app (Version 1.25.0.1511-47afccd4) and the Plex on NVIDIA Shield (which I believe is just Android TV)

Optimizing the database didn’t help. Surprisingly restarting PMS didn’t help either. A database repair also did NOT help. All other libraries load except for ‘TV Shows’… Strange.

I suppose I could recreate this library.

(File removed)

EDIT: I deleted the .plexignore file in the directories for TV Shows, rescanned, and now some items are reappearing… (8 to be exact).

# Ignore all files with "trailer" in the name
*trailer*

# Ignore files with the extension ".cr2"
*.cr2
*.txt
*.jpg
*/*.cr2
*/*.txt
*/*.jpg

# Ignore directories called "Modified"
*Modified/*
*Featurettes/*/*
*Extras/*
*Featurettes/*

# Ignore all ".tif" files in the "thumbnails" subdirectory
*thumbnails/*.tif
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