Almost all movies/shows have missing artwork. When selecting edit, then poster or background tab, almost all the images are just placeholders (which are themselves broken, rendering squished). Sometimes the poster appears in the library view, but does not in either the item view or edit view. When an image does appear in edit view, often selecting it and saving just renders the placeholder in the library and item view.
I’ve cleared all caches (Caches/, Plug-in Support/Caches/), refreshed the library (which actually made the situation worse, losing library view thumbnails), optimized, cleaned, created a second library, unmatched, reanalyzed, and restarted many, many times. All to no avail. There’s no issue hitting any of the metadata servers, nor are there any pertinent blocks logged in any firewalls. All media is matched correctly, and it all had correct artwork previously. The logs show no interesting errors, despite verbose and debug logging being enabled; though I do see requests for artwork—requests which give no error, and display artwork which does not show anywhere in Plex for the relevant media.
This is completely broken, how can I fix it?
Running Plex Media Server 1.2.2.2857 (currently the latest) on FreeBSD.
Public Enemy #1 is incorrect file names and/or structure.
If you had artwork/descriptions at some point previous to the last 3 or 4 months, but can’t make it happen now you should be informed that a critical API that kicked in when encountering poor names went away… now the deal is to rename/restructure your files correctly.
What’s yours look like?
You may have developed a fault, or found a bug, but we won’t know until we see how your files are named and structured.
@JuiceWSA As stated, everything is matched correctly. File names/structure are correct, and have gone unchanged in years (during which the artwork previously displayed just fine). All other metadata pulls correctly, only artwork is broken.
But, anyway, all files are of format <title> (<year>).<extension> or <title> (<year>) - variant.<extension>.
A’ight…
zip up your log files - or rename them to .txt files and attach to next message.
Here are my logs, @JuiceWSA.
These are the logs after restarting the server, refreshing, then rematching, one of the (many) broken items. Its previous state was: broken image in all views. A few minutes after this procedure its state was: post shows in library and item view, broken in edit view; background broken in item view, shows in edit view; most poster/background thumbnails in edit view broken.
Somewhere in there probably lays the answer…
@sa2000 and/or @OttoKerner will probably be able to sniff it out…
I can see your files are named correctly and if your Movie Library is aimed at ‘Films’ it’s fine.
( I just looked at Plex.Media.Scanner.log, but now it’s missing - if memory serves Films is your actual Movie Folder)
That library is just for movies, yea. There is additionally one for TV shows (which is also broken…some thumbs show up on the “recently added” list, but are nowhere to be found in the library, series item/edit, season list, or season item/edit. Another library which is local items only (no remote metadata), has the same behavior as TV shows.
@sa2000 @OttoKerner anything? Still broken.
… good thing @JAMfour is a Plex Pass subscriber…
It doesn’t do a lot for this section of the volunteer support staff tho… 
@JuiceWSA said:
… good thing @JAMfour is a Plex Pass subscriber…
It doesn’t do a lot for this section of the volunteer support staff tho… 
particularly for you, here’s the gist of it: (FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD)
Plex needs a working local loopback address in the Jail where Plex runs.
Some of the default Plex ‘plugin’ and pre-made Plex ‘configuration’ in FreeNAS currently don’t make one available.
Some functions can work around this by using the local private IP, but not all.
And even then you have to add the local private IP of the Plex Jail into
Settings - Server - Network - ‘Show Advanced’ - “List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth”
@JuiceWSA said:
Public Enemy #1 is incorrect file names and/or structure.
If you had artwork/descriptions at some point previous to the last 3 or 4 months, but can’t make it happen now you should be informed that a critical API that kicked in when encountering poor names went away…
Do you know exactly what version this API went away?
@primeval_god said:
Do you know exactly what version this API went away?
No, not really, but to the best of my recollection it was very early 2016.
The API is gone. Goggle yanked it. So if you’re thinking you’d just back up versions… think again. The ONLY way currently to enjoy a peaceful existence with Plex with automated retrieval of internet based artwork/descriptions/etc is through media preparation that is in compliance with Plex naming/structuring conventions.
@OttoKerner Well I’m not running Plex in a jail, so that seems to not be applicable, unfortunately.
But, so, this is quite odd. Apparently I was signed out on the server somehow (I never use any of the account connectivity features anyway, just use it to enable Plex Pass features, so it wouldn’t really go noticed much that I was signed-out), and I just signed-in, and now all the data is appearing.
Any idea why this would be the case? It does certainly seem like a bug, since signing-in shouldn’t affect metadata, correct?
@jamfour said:
Any idea why this would be the case? It does certainly seem like a bug, since signing-in shouldn’t affect metadata, correct?
You still might have to do this then:
Add the local private IP of the Plex server machine into
Settings - Server - Network - ‘Show Advanced’ - “List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth”
