Plex Deleting Movies After Transcoding (Mac Mini)

General Discussions
1

Hi there,

Quick breakdown. I’m running Plex on a Mac with all of my files on two external drives. Movies are sorted into folder by genre and I add movies to Plex by creating a Library with the genre name and then adding the specific genre folder to that library.

I am converting all of my files to MP4 using the following steps.

  1. I search the genre directory for any existing MP4 files and move them to a TEMP directory so they are not transcoded as they’re already in MP4 format.
  2. I do a full refresh of the Genre library so only the files that need to be transcoded are listed.
  3. I transcode all files in the Library to MP4 and then place the newly created MP4 file in the movie folder and delete the old movie file.
  4. I put all of the files that were stored in the TEMP directory back into their movie folders and I’m done. Everything in that Library should now be MP4.
  5. Finally I do a refresh of the Library to reflect the new files.

For some reason Plex is taking all of these files and putting them in the trash and I have no idea why. I had thought that it was due to one of my drives being NTFS so I formatted it to exFat. I had also read somewhere that moving files between drives when you’re using a USB hub can cause problems so I plugged the drives straight into the iMac but it still happens.

The only thing I can think of that might cause a problem is that I’m running Windows 7 under Parallels and I use a program on their to scan for empty directories to make sure I’ve put everything back into the right place. and I haven’t overlooked any movies. Finder is garbage for trying to do any type of search or file management so that part is done in Windows 7 VM.

Sorry for the long post but I wanted to offer up all of the information I can. If anyone else has seen this before and has a solution I’d much appreciate it.

2

I don’t know the exact cause of your issues, but I would have done it differently.

1 - Place mp4 files into a movie folder
2 - Make movie library pointing to movie folder
3 - Place non-mp4 files into temp folder
4 - make temp library pointing to temp folder
5 - convert movies in temp library
6 - move new mp4 files to movie folder
7 - delete temp folder and temp library
8 - update movie library

3

Thanks for the reply. Kind of the same difference though isn’t it? I’m moving files that done need to be converted away from files that do and then mixing them up again. Going forward I will create a new library with a new name just in case there’s something in the database that’s giving me a hard time with the old library name.

4

Sort of except you had PMS scan you original files, then make an optimized version which now means 2 entries in the database. You then moved the MP4 file out and make it the original, so now the optimized database is confused because the original file is different than what it expected and the optimized file it already created is gone, and now there is a new MP4 file. Alternatively, using your method you could have done steps 1 to 3, then:

4 - Copy new MP4 into same location as original file.
5 - delete the optimized job
6 - update library to see the new mp4
7 - delete the original
8 - update again to remove the original from the database

You also add the other MP4 files before either of the update steps.

5

I think I figured out the problem and now I am putting the MP4 files and the files to be transcoded into their own directories and then creating a new library and folder when it’s all complete. When I kept everything in the same library and did the refresh Plex was deleting the transcoded files because they had moved. It shouldn’t but it did.