I’ve recently been adding a lot of tv shows & movies to my optimization list, but i’ve noticed that some episodes keep getting marked as deleted in plex. the mp4 is still there under the plex versions folder, but plex doesn’t seem to know.
I’m not modifying the file or the directory, but it does seem to happen after a library scan.
I’m at a loss here. I just keep having to re-optimize shows that already have the optimized file. Each episode can take up to an hour sometimes. it’s quite a lengthy process taking days.
Are you touching the original file in any way? The optimized version is tied to that, so if you do something to the original, it may delete the optimized version.
Not at all. I checked a few last night. and set some to re-optimize. Woke up this morning, and another couple shows are showing as not-optimized. Nobody else has access.
I did have some files in queue to move into that library, but nothing went into that directory. It was a completely different show.
I haven’t seen that. I haven’t touched the names at all. but some of them have underscores instead of other characters like exclamation marks and colons.
It might be something similar to my post that @Volts mentioned.
In my case, I think that the optimization is actually writing over existing files of the same derived name. It has nothing to do with the original file name on the system, but instead the derived name.
Since Plex Optimization uses the season/episode (or in my case, date) as the name of the file, there is a chance at collisions. In my post, I advocate for a change to this logic, but I am obviously not aware of the decision making that went it into it.
The way I’ve been ‘solving’ this is to use a custom optimization with a different name for each file manually instead of the Library level optimization.
You might try doing that to see if it is the same problem?
@anon18523487
Changing my Recordings Library to be of type Other Videos has its own challenges:
I cannot set a Library of type ‘Other Videos’ as a recording destination.
This means I have to have 2 different libraries pointing to the same directory. One to ‘receive’ the recordings, and the other to handle optimizations.
This means I have an unused Library that I just hide all the time. Kind of pointless
(Edit 12/8) Since I am watching them from ‘Other Videos’, these do not get marked as Watched in the TV Library, so they are not automatically cleaned up after watching them either.
I had to update my library to scan automatically.
This might not matter to some, but I have other systems trigger the scan instead of relying on system events.
(Edit 12/8) I am going to go back to doing manual optimizations because this is just not workable.
PLEASE FIX THIS =(. Not everything no TV is a clean series.
Plex is so feature rich, so issues like this really frustrate me. I am a software engineer, so I understand what goes into product decisions, but I am also a customer with needs, ha!
Update: The problems seem to be specific directories, not necessarily files. I put a video from a show that wasn’t optimizing correctly into one that was, and it wasn’t deleted automatically. I also changed the specific videos in the show that was having issues, and it still would optimize then immediately say “deleted”. I’ve named the actual videos the same as one that worked and that didn’t help, obviously I couldn’t duplicate the directory name because plex would pick it up as a different show.
