I did that and it found some movies but lost all related data. As I was updating those I noticed other titles were still missing so ran scan again… and it found more titles. Missing matching on many titles so I’m fixing those and updating metadata again.
Collections exist but aren’t available in drop down tag field until I “create” it again.
It’s a mess.
I can live with it, it’s just the collections being messed up that is really irritating. Fixing a few bad matches or some artwork isn’t a big deal.
Edit: interestingly watch history on the “new” items is accurate despite being seen as new movies, some custom artwork stayed available if not applied and some is gone… so yeah… some database flubs going on here. I guess when I do my hardware move in the future maybe I’ll plan on a full Plex reset.
Woah. OK, that’s odd in multiple ways. It invalidates some of my “will be recognized as the same item”. That shouldn’t be impacted by file changes if the item wasn’t deleted.
What happened with the Added At dates for those items?
Also woah!!
I feel like I steered you wrong, and apologize.
Also I’m pretty confused. I would understand if things happened immediately, but not later. Clean Bundles/Optimize should be cleaning up orphans, not changing anything that’s in use.
This one is maybe the least surprising. Watch history is stored completely separately.
Yeah… nothing you advised really was different from other moves I’d done so I really wasn’t worried about it. No fault at all.
It really doesn’t make sense to me either. After the change it scanned a bit. Then I ran a scan and metadata refresh manually and nothing was impacted - all looked and worked fine. Then some stuff was messed up today … so I ran a scan and got mixed results and ran a scan again and got more mixed results but finally all the missing movies were back in my library (not all of them came back with the first scan). I ran clean bundles and optimize database before diving into fixing just in case that might have impact later and that’s when I noticed the collections emptied out (except for two that had recent items added)… but I don’t know if that happened after the clean bundles or the previous scans since I might have had that collections screen open and not refreshed.
I’ll live, it’s just annoying. I’m definitely reducing my customizations… and maybe I’ll look into doing this stuff “the right way” if not doing so is going to cause me additional headaches.
I’m using a Macintosh computer as a server running Version 1.25.5.5492, I also have this issue. I’ve been using Plex for years and never had this issue before, it’s so frustrating.
I’ve been running a windows server for years and this issue is unbelievably stupid.
File systems that worked no problem for years suddenly going haywire, movies being deleted and readded but marked as unwatched (even though the watched flag is still in the DB, just orphaned from the movie)
What changed in the scanner in January that caused this amount of screwed-up-ness and how was it ever allowed to go to public release when I posted the error in the beta channel timeframe on January 9th???
You realise how dumb this sounds? What you’re equating this to is not adding the great big “movies” folder to scan, but manually adding every subfolder, which basically means the scanner for new files is absolutely useless?
I’ve been running a plex server since 2013 using a similar style of movies → collection subfolders → files while having a great catchall in the movies folder and it’s never had any issues until Server Version#: 1.25.3.5385 came around. It’s completely messed up my database in more ways than I can care to count.
Yeah I can also attest that this is a serous problem that was the cause of the most recent Patch released in January. I have been using Plex Media Server for a good ammount of years and have NEVER ran into the scanner missmatching files this frequently unless it was something tricky like Anime shows or something like that. Additionally were also having issues transcoding some files as well. Like I tried transcoding Better Call Saul and the transcode would fail every time. These were never an issue before. PLEASE MAKE THIS A PRIORITY FIX in the next patch.
If you are affected by a similar issue to the OP please make sure you’re updated to the latest PMS version (1.25.5 currently) and when you see the issue download the server logs and post them here for me.
Was the initial file added before you updated to version 1.25.5?
If so this is expected in your instance as the old database entry doesn’t yet have the adjusted values. Everything you add going forward shouldn’t exhibit this behaviour though, I just tested an example I found from your logs and it worked perfectly.
Yeah, the entirety of the library was added before the server was updated to 1.25.5, as is everyone’s situation.
Not sure I understand your point though. No more duplicates will be added for that specific file. You’re saying that for other files, if a duplicate is added, this unmatching behavior will continue until every single file has had a duplicate? This’ll make everything and everyone lose its view statistics.
The cause of this in your case is due to the file names having a year while the parent folder does not (e.g. \Movie Name\Movie Name (2022).mkv).
When a file is added we extract a year “hint” and store it in the database. Previously to 1.25.5, if you only have one file in a movie folder like this we would only extract the year from the folder path, and as one didn’t exist the year was blank. As soon as you added a new file to the same folder then we start using the filenames to get the year hint from, and as the database and the new file don’t have matching years it results in this unmatching behaviour.
All new items added from 1.25.5 try using the parent path for the year too which should prevent this behaviour from re-occurring. You could avoid this happening on older items by first ensuring that the item has had its metadata refreshed, then add the year to the end of the folder and scan the library before adding new versions to that path.
Play history does not get removed in this process, it’s stored by item guid so as soon as they previous guid is restored upon rematching then this history is visible again.
Unfortunately that’s not the case. I just created a copy of another file, this time where the folder also had the year. Original file was automatically unmatched (play history was preserved in the unmatched state), new copied file was automatically matched correctly.
After manually matching the original file, the two items were merged and the play history was removed (though the added_at and associated metadata was kept) - my account now explicitly shows the file as having not been played, even though it was before the file was duplicated.
Created a duplicate file in a folder where both the folder name and filenames had the same title and year. Old file was auto unmatched, lost playback history, new file was auto matched but shows up as having been added today, instead of being combined with the existing file that was added years ago.
The gist of it is, this was the previous behavior:
Folder name didn’t need the year as matching was still “best guess” and worked nearly all the time
Filename always contained the year
Creating duplicates made Plex auto-match the new file without touching the older file
New file was auto-merged without any loss of information (play history, date added, etc.)
Yeah I have the same issue since 1.25.3.5492. lots of movies get unmatched. After refreshing their methadata it is matching them again. Plex Media Server Logs_2022-02-11_04-08-31.zip (796.3 KB)
Just joining the chorus of other users confirming this is still happening - just had ~200 unmatched over the last few days. This is the second time it has happened, once late last year. The vast majority of these had no duplicates added and had been matched for years.
Feb 10, 2022 10:45:16.088 [6512] DEBUG - Migrating metadata settings from plex://movie/5d776d8196b655001fe4a9f4 ->
This is why the play history is getting quashed as we should never be setting an empty guid for something. I’ve already found why this is happening and I’m working on a fix, this should prevent the play history getting lost as well as automatically merging the items again.
Throwing my hat in to say my PMS (latest build) on MacMini seems to re-add certain movies as often as every three days. Meta Data is abandoned each time, movies are removed from collections and new collections created (ignoring the minimum 2 movies for a collection rule I’ve set).
I recently started my server from SCRATCH. Complete reset. Hours of customisation. Issue just occurred again last night. Hundreds of files affected.
