Plex Media Server detects some shows and not others

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Server Version#: 1.41.6.9685
Player Version#: Any (Tried on TV, the server itself, my Android phone)
Heya everyone.

I just recently got my Plex server up and running on a CrunchBang++ Linux (Debian based) virtual machine, and it is detecting most of what I have put into the server. The unfortunate bit is that it seems to be finicky/random in what it detects.

When I first set up the server and got it to detect the files, I lumped everything in the /var/lib/plexmediaserver folder. It was okay, but I was annoyed at having TV show episodes being randomly sorted amongst the movies. So, I created the folders movies and tv, and sorted the files accordingly. The funny thing is, is that the server now started detecting some files it hadn’t before (Good Omens season one being one of the few), but started missing a lot of what it had been seeing earlier (The Sandman, Firefly, Earthworm Jim chiefly).

I have tried changing the owner of the files via chown, except I didn’t do that with files previously detected. I tried chmod to add permissions to others than the normal user, but this was also something I didn’t previously do. I tried changing file groups via chgrp, again, not something I had to do before. I have rescanned the folder multiple times. I tried putting the files back in the /var/lib/plexmediaserver folder, only for it to see less.

I’m trying to find any differences between the files that it detects and what it doesn’t, to no effect. Even more, I had played a couple of episodes of Earthworm Jim for my daughters earlier today, so it isn’t a file/codec compatibility issue. Same deal with The Sandman; I didn’t watch any episodes, but I had seen the server generate thumbnails for the individual episodes on my Samsung TV.

The permissions I get from the files are -rwxrwxr-x across the board, so it isn’t that some files are less permissive than others. The service user plex is set as the owner and group for the files, as previously mentioned. I’m just baffled.

Thanks in advance.

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follow plex naming convention. This is one of the biggest things that throw people off.

1 Like
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Do NOT put your media in /var/lib/plexmediaserver.
That directory is used for plex to hold your metadata.

All your media should follow this form.

root@glockner:/vol/media/tv# ls The\ Sandman/Season\ 01/
'The Sandman - S01E01 - Sleep of the Just.mkv'           "The Sandman - S01E07 - The Doll's House.mkv"
'The Sandman - S01E02 - Imperfect Hosts.mkv'             'The Sandman - S01E08 - Playing House.mkv'
'The Sandman - S01E03 - Dream a Little Dream of Me.mkv'  'The Sandman - S01E09 - Collectors.mkv'
'The Sandman - S01E04 - A Hope in Hell.mkv'              'The Sandman - S01E10 - Lost Hearts.mkv'
'The Sandman - S01E05 - 24+7.mkv'                        'The Sandman - S01E11 - Dream of a Thousand Cats+Calliope.mkv'
'The Sandman - S01E06 - The Sound of Her Wings.mkv'
root@glockner:/vol/media/tv# 
root@glockner:/vol/media/tv# ls Good\ Omens/
'Season 01'  'Season 02'
root@glockner:/vol/media/tv# ls Good\ Omens/Season\ 01/
'Good Omens - S01E01 - In the Beginning.mkv'  'Good Omens - S01E04 - Saturday Morning Funtime.mkv'
'Good Omens - S01E02 - The Book.mkv'          'Good Omens - S01E05 - The Doomsday Option.mkv'
'Good Omens - S01E03 - Hard Times.mkv'        'Good Omens - S01E06 - The Very Last Day of the Rest of Their Lives.mkv'
root@glockner:/vol/media/tv#

Can you show a few examples of things you have which have trouble?

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Apparently the difference was the s# in the file names. I didn’t include season numbers in the shows that only have a single season (Trigun, The Sandman, Excel Saga, etc), and now that I have, Trigun has shown up. The downside, is that I have to manually rename each individual episode, one by one. I’m sure I could whip up a batch file to do it for me, but I’m not sure if that would necessarily save more time.

And the funny thing is, I never changed any of the file names; The Sandman didn’t have s1 in its file name before being moved. So the software/server literally chose at random to obscure certain files.

Thanks though.

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Heya ChuckPa,

I’m not moving files from this folder to another folder again. As mentioned earlier, that has only resulted in the server seeing less, and it sees files fine in that folder. Plus, the folder has been completely empty, save for a library directory.

I do thank you for the speedy reply though.

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FWIW:

Most of us use renaming rules / tools to get the files named how PMS wants them.

Sonarr will do it for you as will things like FileBot, TinyMediaManager, etc

Using those tools will help you a lot.

1 Like
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I renamed all the files for those shows; Excel Saga, The Sandman, Firefly, Earthworm Jim, and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy mini series from ages ago. While doing this, I realized that those had shown up earlier because they were in the base folder, which I had originally set for movies. So when I organized them into separate folders and categories, Plex had stricter rules that excluded the single season TV shows.

Good to know now. I still have several more TV shows to rip; Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Greg the Bunny, Tremors, and more.

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Single season shows are not stricter. All shows follow the same naming convention ( Series / Season(s) / Episode(s) )

Here’s an example of a three-part series which gets created as a single season series

[chuck@lizum download.2004]$ cd /glock/media/tv/The\ Secret\ Life\ of\ the\ Airport/
[chuck@lizum The Secret Life of the Airport.2005]$ ls -laR
.:
total 4
drwxr-xr-x  3 chuck chuck   31 Dec  2  2023 ./
drwxr-xr-x 66 chuck chuck 4096 Apr 19 22:48 ../
drwxr-xr-x  2 chuck chuck  243 Dec 15  2023 Season 01/

./Season 01:
total 2645088
drwxr-xr-x 2 chuck chuck        243 Dec 15  2023 ./
drwxr-xr-x 3 chuck chuck         31 Dec  2  2023 ../
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck  572607613 Dec  2  2023 The Secret Life of the Airport - S01E01 - Preparing for Take Off.avi
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck  571428348 Dec  2  2023 The Secret Life of the Airport - S01E02 - Joining the Jet Set.avi
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 1564529044 Dec 15  2023 The Secret Life of the Airport - S01E03 - The Final Approach.mkv
[chuck@lizum The Secret Life of the Airport.2006]$

In this library, /glock/media/tv is one of the root folders for the TV library section

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