I’m having a frustrating time with Plex finding a movie now. I’ve been troubleshooting this for a few weeks now, and still can’t seem to find an answer. This is forum is my last ditch effort!
For the record, I am running Plex on Ubuntu. Here is what I have tried so far:
*Verified that the naming convention with the movie is proper
*Moved the movie out of the folder, scanned library, moved it back in, scanned library.
*Deep scan
*Empty Trash
*Refresh Metadata
*Uninstall and Reinstall Plex
*Reboot the computer
*Created an entirely separate folder for the movie in question, pointed the library there
*Verified that the movie was more than 200MB (it’s 5.5GB)
*Tried renaming the movie to something different
*Verified movie is not corrupt
*Checked folder permissions
*Checked movie permissions
I have googled the crap out of this, and still can’t seem to find the reason. Every forum and post I see appears to mention the same advice of checking the naming convention, some combination of emptying trash, scanning, and refreshing metadata, or verifying the movie is not corrupt.
I do not know what to do. The name of the movie (and it’s folder) is “The Amityville Horror (2005)” without the quotations. It is a .mkv movie.
I have the newest version of Amityville from 2017 titled “Amityville - The Awakening (2017)” as well. This movie scans just fine. It is also a .mkv movie. All my other movies seem to scan just fine, except for the 2005 one.
What on earth can I possible do that I haven’t already tried? Would really appreciate some advice! Thank you so much for your time!
Are you sure Plex is not duplicating the movie with some other movie? You can display all duplicates Plex finds on your server by going into your library and clicking on the little arrow next to “All” and choosing “duplicates.”
If there is a duplicate then you can split them apart and the do a fix match on the one that was wrongly matched.
I tried this, and unfortunately it looks like this isn’t the case. When I tried it, no duplicates appeared.
However, I did try choosing “folders” rather than “duplicates”, and saw the movie folder there. However, there wasn’t any content inside the folder when viewed within plex.
The fact that it shows in the folder view means it is in your file structure but it says little else about your situation.
But it does give you a way to get it into your library:
Go into that folder in Plex and select the movie.
With the movie selected click on the three dots … in the upper right
From the drop down menu select “Match” or “Fix Match” and then follow the prompts to get the match you want.
Look at IMDB to make sure the movie hasn’t had other names. I have a few in my library that, for whatever reason, Plex chooses the alternate name in IMDB. I have to manually change it.
I should be more specific. The file structure is present, but plex does NOT show any movie in this folder. That is, if I navigate to the folder in Ubuntu, I can see the movie inside, open it, and play it just fine. If I chose “folders” in the plex environment, and then open the folder there, the file is not displayed.
kd6lcz,
I didn’t see any alternative names on IMDB (though I’m not sure if I checked correctly). I did see that there was “The Amityville Horror (2005)” was a remake of an older version, called “The Amityville Horror (1979)”, though given the different dates, I don’t see what this would be an issue.
OttoKerner,
I’ve already tried all those tips you’ve suggested…with the exception of WebTools. I will install and try to find it using that later tonight and report back any results. Thanks!
I have found the scan logs to be really helpful for resolving this kind of thing. I thought my permissions were right, but somehow a couple of files were unreadable to the plex user and this was really apparent in the logs. It’s a shame this information isn’t shown more prominently in the app. I don’t know if the packaging is the same for ubuntu as centos but the logs were somewhere under /var/lib/plexmediaserver (which in and of itself is gross, but whatever).
I tried using WebTools, which is a really handy application. The weird thing is, the scanner actually SEES the directory. It just skips over it. When I look at the logs, it says the following:
Aug 02, 2018 21:30:30.869 [0x7f54fad11800] DEBUG - Skipping over directory 'The Amityville Horror (2005)', as nothing has changed; removing 0 media items from map.
How can I get it to stop skipping over this directory?
I run into this a lot, especially on foreign shows and movies where PMS doesn’t have any info about them and usually takes a while before it’s able to catalog them. However, if I choose to browse by folder, I’m of the opinion that I should be able to select a folder and see the video files in said folder, otherwise the option doesn’t make much sense and it’s just a basic equivalent of browse alphabetically. I would ask the devs to enable the ability to do this please. I shouldn’t have to move uncatalogable content to my home movies library just to view it.
I tried the Plex Dance. It did not work. In addition, there were several additional movies I had recently acquired that did not appear either. No idea what is going on. The additional movies that did not appear were:
Sinister 2 (but Sinister appeared), Deep Blue (but Deep Blue 2 appeared), and Shawshank Redemption (the actual names of these movies included the year and were in the proper naming convention). Any other ideas?
Guys, I have at last found the solution! It turns out, it was a permissions problem, but a weird one. Here’s how I found out:
I noticed there were some other movies that weren’t showing up as well. I had checked the permissions on these movies before, however, only at the folder level. Upon checking the actual files themselves, the files did not have the permissions set the same as the folder! As soon as I set them up properly and did the plex dance, I saw the movies immediately.
The weird thing was that I have a script (filebot) that moves the movies into the appropriate folder. However, for whatever reason, some of those movies would lose or have their permissions changed and others not. I have absolutely no idea why some files were okay while others had their properties changed. But this also explains why it took so long for me to catch!
I put a simple chmod update in my script and everything is working perfectly. Thanks so much for everyone’s help!
Blood In, Blood Out (1993) is a classic example of a title that Plex Movie Scanner never gets tight. Even though I have the file name “Blood In, Blood Out (1993)”, Plex always uses the “original title” in IMDb.
