"Playback Error: An Error occurred loading items to play" error only some libraries

Plex Media Server
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Server Version#: 1.24.5.5173
Player Version#:

I have a library of films that is no longer accessible by PMS. I can see the folder from within PMS (Safari is my default browser) but when I click on even to see the files within it I get an error message that says "Something went wrong. An unexpected error occurred, so I can’t even view the files. But when I add new content, under the Overview screen I can see “new titles” with their correct metadata being added. All my files are on drives and in folders on external USB 3.0 drives. I have Movies on one drive and TV shows on another drive. Additionally I have two more drives that are exact clones of those drives and the Movies library points to the identical folders on each drive (to keep the metadata all nicely up to date) so there are two copies of every movie or TV show when the back-ups get cloned each week. When I set up a new Library pointing to the same folder, I got the same error, but when I moved the clone drive to another computer and set up a new PMS, all the movies can be seen and viewed correctly. I even continue to back up the drives weekly and the other computer still has new movies visible in the folders and watchable but not on the main PMS. Up until recently the TV shows library on the main PMS were visible and viewable, but in recent days, those TV Shows files are visible but when I go to watch I get this error:“Playback Error An Error occurred loading items to play” so it seems to be progressively getting worse. I have not moved yet the backup TV Shows drive to the other server. Its been weeks now and I am pulling my hair out trying to fix the problem. and other libraries still work.

I want to avoid having to start completely fresh and re-do everything because there are over 3000 titles, hundreds of which have customized metadata. Is there a way to save all my library and metadata, and then completely remove and reinstall PMS? Then restore the library and metadata as it was?
Many thanks in advance!

The error shows up on the main server and all my players (Apple TV, Roku, Android TV, FireTV etc). Someone suggested its a permissions thing. I need help both diagnosing and then resolving.

System server runs on is: MacOS Catalina 10.15.7 and drivers are Western Digital 12TB drives (for movies - and TV shows - the one with problems) and the clone is exactly the same drive. Still to this day I can add movies to the problem drive and re-clone it to the non-problem drive and still view everything perfectly on the 2nd PMS.

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I have same issue, have you found a solution?

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After all this time, I literally just fixed the problem yesterday so your timing is good. But I couldn’t fix it the way I had hoped which was to get some guidance and find a way to save all my metadata. In the end I just wanted to get my file usage back so I followed the instructions on the Plex Support pages for moving an installation from one machine to another, but adjusting for the fact that it was the same machine. I saved all the metadata correctly I think (over 230 GBs of data!) but somehow couldn’t get it to correctly read so in the end I just re-constructed the folders from screen shots I had take of everything. The only good news was that it still recognized the order of when the assets were added so when I sort by “recently added” which is my preferred method, they all show up correctly. The two biggest losses were a folder of really obscure movies (from DVDs) that don’t have scrapable metadata, and about 40% of those showed up okay because I saved the DVD covers and named them correctly in titles’s folders, but many did not so I will have to manually go back when I have time and fix how they show up (so 60% of about 400 titles) and then also my Playlists section was completely lost (but I took screen shots of that too and used mostly smart rules to create them to re-creating them won’t be too bad, just time consuming. I still don’t know the cause, but just glad to have my libraries usable again. I did learn how to remove the old server that would not go away - you go into settings >Authorized Devices >> and then filter for “Servers” and delete the one you don’t need. Good luck. Would love to hear how you end up solving if you find a real solution - please post whatever happens for the future benefit of others.

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same issue here , I’ll have a bash at this

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