I’ve been running Plex for many years. Been a PlexPass member for at least the past 2-4 years. I’ve had this issue before and have always been able to resolve it on my own or with tips from these forums. But this time NOTHING WORKS and I’m about to lose my mind. I REALLY don’t want to abandon Plex, BUT after 3 weeks of constantly trying to fix this to no avail, after posting in these forums with NO REPONSE, I don’t know what else to do. I’ve spent so much time and effort and MONEY on plex (bought PlexPass, bought a SmartTV with Plex capabilities, bought an AppleTV for BOTH of the non-smart TVs just for Plex. We’re talking $THOUSANDS spent on my Plex setup) and NOW, suddenly, NO metadata, NO help from these forums and all the existing solutions to situations like this DONT WORK. I’m at a total loss. All the old metadata is still there, but when I add something new, it SAYS it’s scanning it, it SAYS it’s loading the metadata, it SAYS it’s done. No metadata. Or just the Director/Writer.
I need help please! How often does one have to come to these forums and ask for (or BEG for) help before someone helps? I understand paying for PlexPass doesn’t guarantee support, but you’d think they’d at LEAST try to help. The entire point of my HUGE investment in Plex is to have the metadata for all my media available and pretty. Seeing every new TV show episode I add show up as “Episode X” with no description or any other metadata is, frankly, depressing and disappointing. The lack of any assistance whatsoever after investing YEARS and $THOUSANDS into the Plex setup only to have to SUDDENLY and without explanation stop working is SO frustrating.
One thing I do see is that under the \Username\Application Support\Plex Media Server\Scanners\ fodler there is nothing. I can’t recall if there should be anything here or not, but my folder is empty.
You’re right. I don’t post a lot. I usually find answers and don’t need to post questions. I’m attaching my logs to this post. I’ve had Plex setup for many years. For TV shows, I have always followed the following naming convention: \TV\ShowName\ShowName.sXXeXX.m4v and I’ve rarely had problems and have always been able to fix them. No so this time.
My Plex Media Server is running on Mac OS 10.9.5 and uses a series of external HDDs for media storage. I’m running the latest available version of PMS (no updates available). This problem started almost 3 weeks ago. I updated to the latest PMS hoping that would resolve the issue but it hasn’t.
I apologize for my frustration, it’s just this is the first time I’ve had this happen and been unable to resolve it and haven’t really been able to find help beyond the standard stuff I’ve always done and that is always suggested in these forums and I’m tired of adding new stuff to Plex and having no metadata for it. If I wanted that experience, I’d just browse/play the videos directly from the file system.
Thanks for any assistance you can provide, I truly do appreciate that you responded and will appreciate any and all assistance! Hope you have a great day.
First thing I notice is your directory syntax. I am not picking a nit but do ask you to be careful of what you type when giving path names. \ is the Windows directory separator. / is used by OS X and Linux.
Now, with respect to what you are seeing, The only obvious thing showing in your example is the mission “Season directory”
/TV/ShowName/Season X/ShowName.SxxEyy.m4v Where X and xx are for the season and yy is the episode number of that season.
I understand that, but seriously, for YEARS I’ve used this exact naming convention and never had any issues. If you’re saying that I need to completely restructure everything into even deeper subfolders, that’s going to be a huge PITA. It also doesn’t make sense that Plex has never had a problem with this structure (in fact, I believe when I first installed Plex many years ago the structure.naming convention I’m using was what was recommended - not sure if that recommendation came from Plex or from the friend that was helping me set it up, but it has always worked just fine without having to separate out shows into folders for each season. Additionally, Plex DOES understand the naming convention as it is putting the shows into the correct seasons, and correct episode order within those seasons. Finally, it is also getting data like Director/Writer for most of the shows it’s missing other data for. I just don’t understand what is suddenly going wrong or why this started suddenly out of the blue. The one thing I do know happened, I believe right before this problem began is that the computer it runs on crashed and rebooted. Everything seemed to come back up fine, but a short time (within 7 days) I noticed metadata was no longer properly populating.
Please advise how I should proceed. I really don’t relish the thought of having to rename and restructure thousands of files, especially in light of the fact that Plex does understand enough to know where the show belongs as far as season/episode and as I’ve mentioned it does seem to be grabbing the Director/Writer metadata from TheTVDB.com correctly in most cases.
Jan 27, 2017 09:43:32.468 [0x1188f5000] DEBUG - Request: [24.97.145.66:52006 (WAN)] GET /hubs/search?limit=10&query=Barbie%20 (10 live) GZIP Signed-in Token (Guest)
Jan 27, 2017 09:43:32.474 [0x1188f5000] ERROR - SQLITE3:0x117bed0d0, 11, database corruption at line 59437 of [fc49f556e4]
Jan 27, 2017 09:43:32.474 [0x1188f5000] ERROR - SQLITE3:0x117bed0d0, 11, database corruption at line 59479 of [fc49f556e4]
Jan 27, 2017 09:43:32.474 [0x1188f5000] ERROR - SQLITE3:0x117bed0d0, 11, statement aborts at 4: [] database disk image is malformed
Jan 27, 2017 09:43:32.474 [0x1188f5000] ERROR - SQLITE3:0x117bed0d0, 11, statement aborts at 18: [select distinct metadata_items.id from metadata_items join
This will happen if a really abrupt power-off / something stupid in the OS/disk/reboot… Not common but does happen (unless the power just went off / computer turned off abruptly)
To recover is easy if you’ve got database backups enabled (Scheduled Tasks)… which it should be.
Im serious. It just won’t start at all. I’ve gone as far as reinstalling the PMS completely and it still won’t start! Please help. I’m so horribly frustrated and discouraged.
Chuck,
I just wanted to sat Thank you. Despite having to rebuild the DB from scratch and all the other issues, you’ve been a HUGE help and have helped me maintain sanity throughout the day today. I’m a media addict and not having Plex behave correctly and then not having ti launch at all was not fun. I’ve started the process of rebuilding the library DB on my Plex server (got it to start after deleting all the stuff you said to delete) and while it will take a while, I’m hopeful that all will be right with the world again.
I apologize for my semi-disparaging remarks at the start of this thread. I allowed frustration to seep into my comments/questions, and I do apologize for that. I actually work in software support and run a team of WORLD CLASS technical support folks. You’ve proven today to be another WORLD CLASS software support person. If you ever live in New York state and need a job in SW support, look me up!
Thanks so much for your help, your time, your patience, your understanding and everything else. I can’t thank you or apologize enough… THANK YOU.
I used to live in Skaneateles, and Schenectady, and Ra-cha-cha, to name but a few I started my own firm there and when it grew too big, I did the smart thing and let go of the reigns. I’m content with being at the “Director” level quite nicely but, above that, the additional politics takes away from the fun of 'just building stuff!
While I’ve learned to take a breath over the years, were my media to get messed up (the actual media), I would feel the same ‘Not-so-linear’ sentiments. To that end, I have my NAS and my media backed up externally on individual drives which can be copied/loaded anywhere as needed.
If I may be bold, perhaps it’s not a bad idea to setup an independent backup mechanism to snapshot your Plex Library (Plex Media Server) complete contents on a routine basis. Then, should this happen in the future, or you make a mistake, you can easily stop, wipe, and restore from that backup. Your media will be intact regardless. Only the Plex database will need catching up to any tweaks you may have made and/or media additions /removals.
I started my own firm there and when it grew too big, I did the smart thing and let go of the reigns. I’m content with being at the “Director” level quite nicely but, above that, the additional politics takes away from the fun of 'just building stuff! 