Fedora 36 XFCE. Plex Media Player will not start, despite being enabled and started via systemctl. After repeated attempts, including leaving it overnight, I get the following :-
Thanks for your comment. I gave up, reinstalled the complete system from Fedora back to the more user-friendly Debian, reinstalled Plexmediaserver and now I have the tedious job of correcting the many mistakes in the libraries once again for two or three hours. Wish there was a sensible way of storing the painstakingly corrected libraries to re-use in a new installation rather than the overly complex, inefficient and non-working method suggested by Plex. It’s a pain keep making the libraries good in the face of so many errors all the while.
Im gonna bet 99% of your issues are naming. I could delete my entire library, and have it rebuilt in a week (letting plex scan and re-index/download all metadata) and I have a massive library. The number of errors that you would find, you could probably count on one hand.
I respect your point, but you would be mistaken. I took a lot of time to go through every file ensuring they conformed to Plex guidelines. But there are still loads of errors. Some brief examples, some of which have the correct thumbnails but for some unknown reason the titling was different ! - Harry Potter and the Philosophers’ Stone - correct thumbnail, for some reason gets changed to the Sorcerer’s Stone! Who Dares Wins movie with Lewis Collins and Edward Woodward gets the correct thumbnail and bizarrely is titled The Final Solution. Spooks: The Greater Good movie is given the incorrect thumbnail AND the incorrect titling being renamed “MI-5”. There are many more examples. In music multi-million selling very popular Ministry Of Sound titles incorrectly rendered. One example (of many) Back To The Old Skool 2 (100,000 plus units sold) according to Plex is an “unknown album” and doesn’t find the cover for it! Don’t get me started on the music videos! There isn’t even a library for them. Using Other Videos incorrectly shows thumbnails landscape with no obvious way to correct them to portrait (used to be portrait several iterations ago). I have to list them as movies and hardly any of them get the correct thumbnails. I have a lot of Michael Jackson music videos (King of Pop) which Plex doesn’t trouble itself with, lot of Fatboy Slim videos same reaction from Plex. Doesn’t even correctly recognise Concert For George the George Harrison tribute concert. TV series - immediately shows correct thumbnails when the “Fix Match” is used, why not show it in the first place? - The Baron, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons just a couple that come to mind. Very frustrating. Most of the trouble is in the Music and Music Videos libraries. I only have a relatively modest collection, 94 tv series, around 340 movies, 60ish music videos and 2500 music albums but it is extremely frustrating.
Sorry too late, scrapped the whole Fedora installation, reloaded Debian, reloaded plexmediaserver which works fine and resigned myself to hand correcting all the library errors. Thank you for your interest.
Didn’t seem any interest in my query, so i moved on and sorted it. I was hoping for a positive solution, but this is the third or fourth time I’ve tried to move my painstakingly corrected plexmedaserver, each time meticulously following the instructions (I’m autistic so tend to be meticulous) and garnered the same reaction. So I’ve resigned myself to either having incorrect entries (unacceptable to my condition) or spending hours correcting library errors and putting movies into correct sequence. Something else i don’t follow, why my movie library isn’t sorted by age as well as title; for example there are eight Harry Potter movies but not only is the title of the first one changed for some unknown reason (despite having the absolutely correct thumbnail) but the films are not sorted into the correct sequence of release. I have to spend time correcting this. There are multiple examples, i have a list of them. I have tried Emby which is worse and Kodi which has a poor interface, so plex is the one I seem to be stuck with, despite my disappointment with it.
We do this because the tools take the filenames we have,
Go out to the internet and match our names with the pristine name
Present us a proposed new name (mapping old → new name)
Allow us to click “Rename” and have the tool put our media in perfect Plex order so everything works the first time.
Regarding
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
-aka-
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
The title was changed in certain countries.
It is best explained here:
I was coming to help you (I am busy around the forums helping many folks).
Response from us isn’t always instantaneous. We try to be quick but sometimes that just doesn’t happen because of timing & timezone differences.
Lastly, Fedora versus Ubuntu/Debian, I am the engineer who does the packaging for both distributions and know exactly how PMS runs on them.
Had I been given the opportunity to help you, I know I’d have gotten you resolved in short order.
Is there anything I can do at this time to help you?
Supplemental Info: Harry Potter movies named by a renaming tool. (US naming)
[chuck@lizum uhd.2004]$ ll | grep -i potter
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 72 Nov 20 2021 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)/
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 76 Nov 20 2021 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010)/
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 76 Nov 20 2021 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (2011)/
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 68 Nov 20 2021 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)/
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 71 Nov 20 2021 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)/
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 74 Nov 20 2021 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)/
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 73 Nov 20 2021 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001)/
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 73 Nov 20 2021 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)/
[chuck@lizum uhd.2005]$
Thank you for your patience and for trying to be of assistance, it is very kind of you but i do not understand your response. I have a load of media files on my computer. They are all correctly named as per Plex guidelines. I spent many hours in a file manager hand correcting them making sure of that. Why on earth would i need a renaming tool if I have meticulously made sure entry by entry they are correct to start with? Please help me understand.
Not knowing how your names are (I’ve not seen them), I was sharing, based on my experience, the most common confusion regarding those films.
I am equally meticulous. Every media item I have is perfectly named and structured.
I have a physical disability so use a renaming tool to make media curation easier.
A very common issue, which we see over and over, is poor naming. I have been told, more times than I can count “My media is perfectly named”. Upon inspection, 99% of the media was incorrectly named. After renaming it, everything worked as it should.
Why would I mention a renaming tool?
So you won’t have to spend hours typing names by hand. Let the machine do the work
You get perfect named media and immediate , proper, media matches the first time with NO fussing at it.
Very kind of you. To honour you i promise I’ll take a look at a renaming tool. It cannot ruin anything because of course i have an up to date backup so if I’m unhappy i can restore. Honestly believe mine is spot on but no harm in double checking. See you on the other side of finding and running a renaming tool!!! Thanks again for your kind and very patient help.
