Plex Troubleshoot AGAIN: NOT pulling in METADATA & Posters for Movies [UNSOLVED]

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
22

Sorry, what “changes” are you referring too?

Where do you see changes being made?

Basically, all was running fine since the last time I experienced this issue. it turned out to be a database corruption. So I uninstalled Plex, deleted the user, deleted the Plex Shared Folder, and ran a reinstall.

Now, it started happening again. I repeated the same process I uninstalled Plex, deleted the user, and ran a reinstall. I kept the Share Folder naming it “Plex. Old” you can see this in the first post AND no Metadata was pulled in at all.

So I renamed “Plex. Old” to “Plex” and started working on that again, naturally updating the user permissions.

And now I am here working on the original database.

23

I am not running a VPN. Just a NAS connected to my Router at 100 megabits per second. Again, all was running fine until recently with no changes.

If I can get some clearer details on the changes being seen in the logs I can help provide more accurate information.

As of now, I am filling you all in on everything I know.

1 Like
24

Thank you for that.

Go to Prom Might and Gotti and see what MediaInfo reports for name (The XML will also show you this)

Hover over it, Get Info -> View XML. If that name isn’t clean and the same, you have found your answer.

It should be empty or the same as the movie… without all the extra things at the end in parenthesis or brackets

1 Like
25

ChuckPA,

Not sure if you saw the screenshot a few posts back but they show all the files names that are having issues getting Metadata.

Here is Prom Night XML Screenshot

08%20PM
08%20PM929×538 128 KB

Here is Gotti XML Screenshot

20%20PM
20%20PM930×538 150 KB

I have also attached a PDF Zip.
XML.zip (121.6 KB)

26

Do you feel running a database repair would help? I was reading into it but not quite sure of all the steps.

27

So I did walk through the file name process with a new movie, to show the thread that it has nothing to do with the file names.

49%20PM
49%20PM1054×474 21.8 KB
12%20PM
12%20PM692×723 27.4 KB
43%20PM
43%20PM642×388 70.3 KB
34%20PM
34%20PM891×561 109 KB
51%20PM
51%20PM901×555 128 KB

Attached are the logs. Still no luck. Been looking around for more details, but have not found much.
Any suggests on what to do?
Plex Media (3.6 MB)
Plex Media Server Databases_2018-10-17_14-12-09.zip (10.3 MB)
Slender-Man-XML.pdf.zip (93.8 KB)

28

I figured it out.

21%20PM
21%20PM937×534 317 KB

09%20PM
09%20PM930×538 136 KB

Logs and Debug attached.
Plex-Debug-4.pdf.zip (35.2 KB)
Plex Media (3.8 MB)
Plex Media (3.9 MB)

29

Just when I thought all was fixed and good to go. Here we go again…

Not sure why this keeps happening or how to fix it. It seems every time I dive in and begin cleaning it all up eventually it fixes itself, but the issue is getting kinda annoying at this point and not sure what else to do.

It’s so strange because this ONLY happens with Movies, not TV Shows.

All details can be seen below.

48%20AM
48%20AM849×589 58 KB
30%20AM
30%20AM850×588 79.1 KB
11%20AM
11%20AM1465×341 180 KB

10-25-Plex-Debug.pdf.zip (31.5 KB)
Plex Media (2.7 MB)
Plex Media Server Databases_2018-10-25_09-15-28.zip (10.7 MB)

30

Web debug isn’t needed in these cases (you don’ need provide it).
Hovering over the item, clicking “Get Info” and then “View XML” is more helpful.
It tells us what PMS is seeing in the file.
It will tell us if there is errant metadata (embedded) confusing PMS in the Name or Title fields.

31

Hi -

Thanks for responding. Okay on the Debug I was unsure if it was helpful or not for the community forums.

I have attached the XML Files.

Terrifier - XML.pdf.zip (46.7 KB)
Mile 22-XML.pdf.zip (130.5 KB)

32

Thanks for those.
Names are good. I, personally, erase the Title field so PMS doesn’t even attempt using them.

I do request we now clear the caches

  1. Stop PMS.
  2. File Station -> Plex - Library - Application Support - Plex Media Support - Plug-in Support - Caches
  3. Delete everything you see in there
  4. Start PMS.
  5. Refresh all metadata for that section.

Should this fail, we will need dig deep.

33

Hey @jsehwani , @ChuckPa
Were you able to get this working? I had a similar issue and I’ll detail my issue, root cause, and solution.

Issue
Plex would randomly stop grabbing metadata. It would start working, and then stop at intermittent times. The odd time after starting and stopping PMS, the metadata would end up pulling, but it wasn’t a guaranteed solution.

Troubleshooting
While viewing the PMS logs in real-time, I noticed after trying to refresh metadata for an object, I would see Error issuing curl_easy_perform(handle): 28. That was telling me there was a timeout trying to grab the metadata.

I did something similar to what @sa2000 suggested in this post and ran wget http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/lxvTtIQOGbi7ZLpyCCEMGAinvz5.jpg on my DS918+.

Output:
--2018-12-17 03:11:49-- http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/lxvTtIQOGbi7ZLpyCCEMGAinvz5.jpg Resolving image.tmdb.org (image.tmdb.org)... 2606:4700::6810:399b, 2606:4700::6810:3c9b, 2606:4700::6810:3a9b, ... Connecting to image.tmdb.org (image.tmdb.org)|2606:4700::6810:399b|:80...

This was odd. I know I had disabled IPv6 in PMS under Settings -> Network by unchecking the Enable server support for IPv6 checkbox early on during my setup process. :thinking:

My Root Cause
I believe the issue was happening for me when the DNS results for tmdb.org were returned and cached with the IPv6 address. That cache would stay there for days (potentially) until it expired and sometimes I would get lucky with the IPv4 response caching instead and then metadata refresh would work as expected.

My Solution
In the Synology DSM web portal, navigate to Control Panel -> Network -> Network Interface , select the for your network and click Edit (in my case, my interface was LAN 1). Click the IPv6 tab and change IPv6 setup from Auto to Off and reboot the Synology NAS.

After reboot I SSH’d back in and attempted to grab the same file from tmdb.org.
Output:
--2018-12-17 03:16:03-- http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/lxvTtIQOGbi7ZLpyCCEMGAinvz5.jpg Resolving image.tmdb.org (image.tmdb.org)... 104.16.61.155, 104.16.58.155, 104.16.60.155, ... Connecting to image.tmdb.org (image.tmdb.org)|104.16.61.155|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 61320 (60K) [image/jpeg] Saving to: 'lxvTtIQOGbi7ZLpyCCEMGAinvz5.jpg'

Now since the IPv6 stack is completely disabled on the Synology NAS, the traffic is forced through IPv4 and resolves properly.

TL;DR
Try disabling IPv6 on your NAS and see if that fixes things.

Hope this info helps.
Cheers!

34

FYI, Unless your ISP only allows IPV6 AND you only have an IPV6 LAN, do not use IPv6
IPv6 -> IPv4 is handled by the ISP. Mixing the two worlds in on your LAN is very problematic

35

Agreed, though its worth mentioning that most devices will at least supply an IPv6 interface with a link-local address and unless that is disabled, those who have IPv6-enabled ISPs are susceptible to receiving IPv6 DNS responses.

So what happens when Plex has IPv6 disabled in the settings, but tries to access a URL with a cached IPv6 response? That is what I think my issue was.

36

PMS IPv6 is local LAN only. Nothing more at this point.
Engineering is working on implementing full native IPv6 support. No word on when that might be ready.

I run IPv4 only. Plex.tv sends V4 addresses at this time.

37

This has no relevance to what gets used outbound from the server

It would be your network setup, isp DNS as to whether ipv6 addresses are returned. Plex Media Server agent tries all the 10 ip addresses - the ipv6 ones and ipv4 ones. May be some isp’s are not providing routes to ipv6 addresses

38

slingrtv,

I hope all is well. As you can see I tried virtually everything in the book, there was to try to resolve this metadata issue. After a lot of experimenting, the ONLY thing that seemed to work for me was to believe it or not wait.

There seems to be some “indexing” that needs to get done between Synology and Plex once a new file gets added. I noticed when I added in bulk the time to index took a lot longer than expected, however, I added a few files at a time the duration of this “indexing” was far less. I wish I could pinpoint the solution but it was more a “cocktail” of trial and error until it worked for me.

My typical process involved: Stopping Plex, Clearing out the Plex Cache, Restarting Synology NAS, Running Plex, Ensuring that the files got matched properly with the “IMDB” tag, and lastly running a refresh. When this does not work, I wait several hours and attempt to run a “Refresh Meta Data” again. It works after that.

I cannot explain why, but my best educated guess is that some indexing is required on the NAS-side.

I hope this helps you in your efforts.

39

I have this exact same problem… First time I ended up re-formatting my entire NAS, seeing as I formatted it in brtfs, and that made everything sloooow. This time it’s running ext4, and working a lot better.

I have however had issues with posters, but it’s usually fixed itself within a few days. Same curl error, same problem. Now it’s been going on for a week. I add one movie, it works, two hours later I add another - suddenly it doesn’t.

To troubleshoot, I added the network drive on my Mac to a PMS server running on it, and bam - posters loaded fine, first time.

I really don’t get what’s up. I don’t understand fully how PMS work, so I can’t really read the logs properly, neither have I tried to SSH and check the networking through my NAS.

I have however done the Plex dance, clearing cache multiple times, restarting, rebooting many times - no result. But I’m hoping that time will help once again.

I seriously just don’t get why it works on my Mac and not my DS918+. Funny thing is, that it seems to load all other metadata but posters correctly.

If anyone’s got a fix or a pointer, let me know!

EDIT: Added logs, if anyone is curious: Plex Media Server Logs_2018-12-19_01-30-35.zip (3.0 MB)

40

Not sure if this will work for you, but I think I had the same problem. I went into the library advanced settings (3 dots next to Movies>Edit>Advanced) and changed the Agent to The Movie Database. I refreshed the metadata and the posters showed up. Hope this helps.

41

I’ve been having this very same issue for almost a year (see this post Problem downloading artwork from TMDB (Argentina Users))
Apparently there is a problem between Plex, TMDB and Cloudfare, that’s why TV Shows works fine, because it’s pulling data from a different database.
Some people claim that when their ISP changed their modem/router, the problem got solved.
In my case, I know for a fact that is an ISP related issue because when I connected the PMS with a 4G LTE connection, it pulled metadata as it should.
It is beyond my understanding why no one could get this problem fixed.