ok.
2 common causes for movies not showing up in Plex are:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201543057-why-is-some-of-my-content-not-found/
Star Wars Episode VI Return of the Jedi
Pretty much everything I see in your screenshot is named incorrectly. Refer to the naming guide. At the very least you need Title (Year) at the folder level.
Return of the Jedi (1983)
yeah, you need the year on all of those. And folder depth doesn’t seem to matter because I just did a test by putting three movies in a folder and dropping that folder 9 folders down and building a library off the top level. Worked just fine.
And I don’t mind the clutter. Better that than 4,000 folders. I have folders for movies where I have more than one and other than that they all go into the pile, This is the G-H-I folder.
You can argue all you want, and ignore the guide, but it will eventually fail. There is a reason there are guidelines setup. Every week someone posts here or on Reddit why their libraries dont work, Plex sucks, etc etc and its often that media is too nested. shrug argumentative people. Must be a holiday weekend.
This thread is a clear example of someone who didn’t consult the guide. And the answers provided to Plex users should be the correct ones, as suggested by official guides, not forum advice that “might work cause I just tried it and it works.”
Yeah, and the probable issue was what he named his files. Kind of what I asked up above and you said that was “irrelevant”. Most of the time the file name is the cause of matching issues. Other than the names, this guy is following the guidelines. As I asked, if there is a directoy limit, what is it? I have never found it. Name a movie incorrectly? Fail to put a date on it? That will almost always cause a fail.
You keep mentioning the guide and you provided the link to where it’s located. I went to the webpage and the way Plex says it should be is exactly the way I have it. Regardless, my library contains over 12 TB worth of media. There is no way in the world I’m spending the next god knows how many weeks renaming all my folders. If it comes to that I’ll dump Plex and look for another solution way before I do that.
Ok. Good luck.
“If it comes to that I’ll dump Plex and look for another solution way before I do that.”
As said by 5stringdeath, good luck. He is absolutely right.
Most media servers that pull metadata use the same protocols to scrape the info from IMDB. Those require the name match the way the name is shown in IMDB. If not, how do you expect it to know the difference between:
A Star Is Born (1937)
A Star Is Born (1954)
A Star Is Born (1976)
A Star Is Born (2018)
Or for that matter…
Ocean’s Eleven (1960) or (2001)?
Ghostbusters (1984) or (2016)?
Hellboy (2004) or (2019)?
Lion King (1994) or (2019)
or the other remakes or reboots of Thomas Crown Affair, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Jungle Book, Dumbo, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliett, Fantastic Four, The Fly, King Kong, …
I could go on but you get the drift.
Riddle me this. There are 2 movies on my hard drive that are listed one after the other both in the exact same format. The first one is the movie 1945. It resides in a folder by the same name and and inside the folder there are 2 files. One mp4 file which is the actual movie and the artwork file in a jpeg format. This movie shows up in my Plex library. The very next movie on my hard drive is the movie 1984. It’s set up in the exact same configuration and this one is NOT showing up in my Plex library. Why is that??
IMDB only has one film by the name 1945. It has at least three by the name 1984. Again, eventually you are going to have to rename all your stuff to match what PLEX (or Kodi or any other scraper) needs to do their job.
Thank for your help. I understand what you mean but renaming my entire library seems way too tedious of a task for me. I guess my library will remain the same until I can find a better solution. Wish Plex worked more like VLC. It has no problem finding all my files. Of course it’s nowhere near as complicated as Plex and doesn’t have the features Plex offers but it’s simplicity works better in my case.
Sounds like you want a simple DLNA solution
I guess so. Too bad that’s not built into Plex as an option
You need Filebot. It has a Plex mode that will help rename all these files and it might be configured to help with the folder names as well. I think I linked to the author. Maybe he will chime in and help configure it to rename.
I went through a renaming event a couple of years ago and Filebot was my savior.
For years I used a Western Digital Live TV box. Little box that you could hang hard drives off of. It wouldn’t present films as movie posters or gather up metadata. It just played whatever you had. It would play every file format on earth. Just run an HDMI to the TV and boom, your entire media library online. They stopped making those boxes a few years back and I sold both of mine on eBay for a lot more money than I expected. But yeah, when I went to PLEX, I spent MONTHS cleaning up my library. Months. But at least it works now. Good luck.
You can always browse by folder view if you don’t care about pretty metadata.
It might seems like a lot of work but start with one Library folder and correct it per week, say 10 titles a day. All new add in the correct format.
I can say one thing it will be worth the effort. To have the correct artwork and Title summary etc
