Server Version#: 1.40.2.8395
Player Version#: 1.93.0.144-9b2f4a13 (but also others)
I have my TV shows organized by decade across several drives. I have a library for each decade and everything works great. But…
I recently created one, huge library for ALL TV Shows that includes the drives/folders for all of the decades. Unfortunately, I’ve had some problems with this. The first (the new Plex agent insistent some of my shows were different series from different dates) I reported earlier and have worked around by using the working agents first, then switching to the new agent (to stop the nagging) after everything was correctly identified.
The second problem is that at least one show (and I’ve no idea how many more) is simply never detected in the new library. The folder name is “Doctor Who (2005)” and there is a folder for each season, with the episodes named like “Doctor Who (2005) - S00E00 - Episode Title.mp4” AND they were all detected for the “2000s TV” library, where they still may be found. But my new “All TV Shows” library simply refuses to list this show. It lists other shows from the same drive/root library folder, but seems to completely ignore this one. Of course, it could be filing the episodes under a different show, but finding that would require checking the files associated with every episode of every show and, frankly, I’m not going to live long enough to complete that!
So, is there any way to force the scanner to “see” a show/folder? I’ve tried manually running scans with no effect. I don’t really want to do “The Plex Dance” because now I’m concerned that the show will be lost from its existing library if I do that! Any suggestions?
Now here comes the crucial part.
There is a right way and a wrong way to proceed:
Wrong way:
To create a library for all shows together, it was simply pointed to the parent folder of the decades folders.
Right way:
Each decade folder has been added to the “all shows” library individually, so that you can see all decades listed on the “Add Folders” tab when you edit the library.
I added each individual decades folder. I do my best to following all of the folder and file naming conventions from the documentation Naming and Organizing your TV Show files. FWIW, a few of the actual names I added to the library are:
F:\2000s TV
F:\2010s TV
G:\1950s TV
H:\2010s TV
I:\1960s TV
etc. I would never add the root folder of a drive to a library, but all of the folders I do add to libraries are found in a root folder. Hopefully that makes sense.
My problem is that it has now been a week and the 2005 version of Doctor Who has never been found by the new, combined library (the original '60s series and the new 2023 version have been found.) I find myself wishing for a command to add a specific folder/show, since the scanner simply refuses to detect it. The scanner does detect the three shows that come alphabetically before Dr Who 2005, and the found that come after it, so it is not a problem with the drive or folder. Also, I have no problem watching episodes using the 2000’s TV library that originally was the only library that included shows from the 2000s.
The scanner just seems to have Doctor Who (2005). I’m going to try poking into the server’s logs, but honestly, I really don’t understand much of anything in them and might not even look in the right ones. But I might stumble on something.
[EDIT] I ran a manual scan of the new TV Shows library and when it finished I downloaded the server logs. There are 6 Plex Media Scanner logs, each containing an almost identical (the times differ) three line header and nothing else. They were all created in a 10 minute window, 10 minutes BEFORE I requested the scan. So nothing there. The current Plex Media Server log file contains some “WARN - Duplicate media part detected” messages about some Doctor Who 2005 specials that I copied in to the Dr Who 2023 specials (because they are listed in both on TheTvDb) and I hadn’t finished renaming them when Plex detected the duplicate names.
So the server SEES the missing Doctor Who (2005) folder, but the show doesn’t show up in the library. Sigh. So much for a single, combined library. I thought there might just be too much stuff for Plex to handle…
Switch the library to Episodes view mode, then activate the Duplicates filter.
If you see any dups which aren’t specials, inspect their Plex media info.
It is possible that the 2005 and the 2023 shows have been conflated. If they are, navigate to the main show page and use the Split command.
I will check … but … there are 14 season in 2005, and only part of 1 season in 2023, and I already know for a fact that only the 2023 episodes are showing in the 2023 version, and each shows 1 file attached to the episode. (I originally had them misnamed and was checking constantly while I fixed the names.)
So, if the two are conflated, where did the other 13 seasons go? Not to mention all the season 1 episodes of 2023 that haven’t aired yet (but would be shown, since 2005 had 13 and 2023 has only 8, only 4 of which have aired.)
[EDIT] I also checked the original Dr Who and found that, indeed, it was conflated with the 2005 series. Hopefully the split will work, it is processing now. Thanks!
[EDIT 2] The split finished and, after I fixed the match (I still say that Fix Match should start with the ‘raw’ title/date rather than the WRONG title/date!) I found that some of the show titles don’t match titles from thetvdb. For example, S00E162, S00E163 and S00164 are all incorrect. I’ve been using thetvdb as a standard for episode numbering (and FileBot for naming, which does as well). Too bad the “new, better” Plex Agent uses its own source. Could you provide a link to a searchable site that we may use to correctly number our episodes for the Plex Agent? Preferably something as clear and easy to use as thetvdb?
The problem turned out to be that, with Doctor Who (2023) so new (at the time I had issues) that some things were apparently “in flux” on TheTvDb. I originally found the new series as season 15 of Dctor Who (2005) (which is actually is, just 'cause Disney distributes it doesn’t make it a new series!) But that later changed to the new name. The specials where the new Doctor was introduced appear to be listed as belonging to BOTH shows – but with different series titles and episode numbers – I don’t think Plex will EVER handle merging those correctly! (Nor do I expect it).
Again, thanks for all of the ideas, they helped me to solve my problem.
