Server Version#: many versions previous up to current, 1.41.5.9522
Player Version#: multiple
Have had this issue for many years, across multiple versions, have done extensive testing on this, and decided to create a post for it.
In PMS under Windows (haven’t tested in another environment), when I introduce a pre-roll, and say it’s titled “pre-roll1.mkv” and it’s an HEVC video with AC3 surround sound (just an example, I’ve tested this across multiple video/audio codecs)it’ll play fine. If I decide for whatever reason I need to change something about the video, whether it’s the video codec, audio codec, etc, make the change, then put the file back, still named the same, plex will fail to play the pre-roll. However, if I then rename the pre-roll to something it’s never seen a pre-roll named as, such as “NEWPre-Roll1.mkv”, it’ll play the pre-roll just fine, without any additional change having happened other than the name change.
So to reiterate.
Pre-roll1.mkv plays fine
change codec to better suit environment
pre-roll1.mkv (with changed codec) fails to play
NEWPre-roll1.mkv (exact same video file, just renamed) plays fine.
This leads me to believe PMS is caching metadata somewhere for pre-rolls, and is trying to play based off initially scanned metadata for the scanned filename, and I’d like to find a way to remove that metadata so I can continue to fix/adjust any pre-rolls I introduce, especially as I have a bunch of scripting I use in windows to automate things like pre-rolls based on holidays, and need to test pre-roll video files to see how they appear in the plex environment.
