I have a Plex Server using the official docker image running on UNRAID and over the past few days when I wake up in the morning Plex is showing captured frames from file as opposed to the posters that it had previously downloaded.
So, when I first import a file everything happens automatically and correctly, the poster and other metadata show up and it looks normal.
Then, after a period of time, the poster switches to a captured frame as if Plex couldn’t do a match on the asset. When I notice this I can do a “refresh metadata” and the poster shows up normally.
I have no idea why Plex is “losing” these posters. I don’t even know why it’s refreshing them to begin with.
It only seems to be happening to newer titles but the problem has been spreading deeper and deeper into my library over the past few days. At first it was just a single, newly added, movie. Then it was a few more, then a few more. This morning I woke up and there was close to 15 movies that had all “lost” their poster.
This doesn’t appear to be happening to any other media. Just movies.
I am sure this isn’t it, but one thing a bunch of people are going to tell you (so let’s just eliminate this first) is to check that you are not selected to “Prefer local assets”. When that is turned on, sometimes a keyframe stored inside the video file will override the poster. Again, I’m sure it is not this, just eliminate it so people can help troubleshoot.
It doesn’t seem like that’s an issue as the movie starts out correct and then a day or two later it goes to the key frame. So strange. It just happened again and I have Plex set to not rescan files.
It just happened again. I added 4 new movies. They showed up correctly. Then after a few days something caused all the art to revert to frames from the films.
The strange thing is that the initial scan shows the correct poster then somehow, later, it gets changed. Why?!
I’ve narrowed it down to a change in the past three months. For some reason movies after that point have a frame if their content as the last poster in the edit metadata panel and Plex is choosing those.
Movies before then didn’t have this happen.
I’ve tried a refresh metadata on a film that doesn’t have the frame in its poster list and one doesn’t get added so this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with local metadata.
I’m also having this issues for a while now. Before if I refreshed the metadata for an individual file it would reappear, but now I can’t even get that. It’s frustrating that this isn’t something that Plex addresses given the amount of people with the same issue.
OK, I’ve noticed that for a new movie the poster comes in correctly but then when I click on the movie for the first time Plex does another refresh and I lose the poster.
It seems as though at some point Plex is doing a scan of the movie and pulling frames out and then placing those frames as poster options.
When it does this refresh (caused by me clicking on the film) it refreshes and chooses one of the frames as the poster. If I then force a refresh Plex will select one of the posters from the internet.
I have noticed, however, the the refresh usually selects an entirely different poster than the initial selection. Why? No idea. What causes Plex to decide which poster it wants to use?
