Does anybody have an good way of preventing Plex from trying to scrape extra content in movie library ?
Seems like lately (at least the last 10 versions or so) Plex has decided that anything it sees needs to be scraped.
I have my extra files located in a sub directory named “Others” under each folder.
Yes, I’m aware that the documentation says to use “Other” but that never worked for me and it still doesn’t work now.
I used a bulk re-naming tool to rename them all from “Others” to “Other” and rescan the library. And yes it cleaned it all up and them promptly re-added them all.
I have renamed them back to “Others” and got exactly the same result.
And what’s really frustrating is that Plex just grabs whatever information it can find and takes a shot in the dark, so now my library is thoroughly hosed.
Yes. Extras files from different movies. Non of them named correctly. Hence the catch-all “Others” folder for all the files.
And yeah. What I’m looking for is for Plex to either ignore them or preferably categorize them as “Other” extra files.
And no. I have zero interest in going through and manually renaming every single file to fit whatever the scheme of the day is for Plex to sort this out.
I just want it to NOT blow up my library.
I always had that particular setting OFF - so Plex wouldn’t go find extras that aren’t mine.
A Recent Server upgrade turned it back on for me.
I had to turn it off again, then Refresh Metadata for my Entire Library to get rid of them. The switch works - if you can keep it off. Plex arbitrarily turning it back on is… irritating.
Personally I find the whole “Extras” feature the, by far, most in need of an overhaul part of Plex.
Almost everything else can be made to work fairly simply. But somehow “extras” has to follow this archaic arbitrary scheme and nobody seems to care enough to update it.
I’ll refresh the metadata in my library and see what it does.
So. They used to be named “Extras”.
Coz I also use Kodi for playback of the same libraries.
Was told to re-name them all to “Others” to keep Plex from scraping them as Plex wouldn’t recognize “Extras”.
I’m not trying to be a tool. But this part of Plex feels like a 10 year old afterthought that nobody cares about.
It’s obviously lacking in functionality and flexibility, and yet every single time it’s brought up the answer is “bla bla go look at the documentation that’s still incorrect after 5 years or ‘just’ something something”.
And yeah. That quickly get’s really frustrating.
It’s one thing that it’s borderline broken. It’s another thing entirely that the people with the power to get it fixed just defends it, in the same way that city hall defends potholes, just “coz”.
And yes. I can give you the link to the several year old thread where I was told to re-name all the sub folders from “Extras” to “Others” since asking for a custom filter for extras was too much to ask for.
No disrespect. And I’m not discounting your version of events.
But I didn’t re-name 1000 subfolders for the giggles of it.
I would love for Plex to be able to handle extras in a sensible manner and include them as actual extras under the titles that they belong to.
But as it is right now the choice is between not having extras at all or having them be scraped as individual titles.
The latter being completely unacceptable. So I choose “no extras”.
Now if you can give me a solution that will make extras work that does NOT require renaming every single individual file in order to satisfy some arbitrary scheme then awesome.
But if not then no extras is what I choose.
It’s not optimal but at least it doesn’t disrupt the main functionality of Plex.
That would be what you already did: use “Other” as folder name. This should make every item within these folders appear as a local extra, with the categorization as “Other”. Not so bad, IMHO.
And the renaming is quickly done with the right software.
If it doesn’t work for you, you either didn’t use the “Plex Movie” Agent or you might have a mix of “every movie in its own subfolder” and “different levels of arbitrary subfolders” in your library.
So I’m gonna have to say that obviously this did not work as if it did then i would not have opened this thread.
And my setup is as follows:
two separate roots on SMB/CIFS shares
\server\Movies
\Movie Title - (year)
\Movie.Title.(year).format.mkv (etc Pre-scraped by MediaCompanion)
\Others
\ExtraFiles.mkv (all a mess and excluded from MediaCompanion but included in Kodi as Extras data)
This used to sorta work but lately Plex started adding individual extra files to the library as standalone movie titles.
Hence why I opened this thread in the first place.
To me that is not expected behavior with the above configuration, nor does it jive with the documentation, and as an end user it’s not a a case of simply having to rename 10k+ files to fit a naming convention.
Am I missing something here ?
Coz from where I sit this is simply just broken.
Addded to library is \server1\Movies and \server2\Movies (and a bunch of other servers/shares for other media).
I’m not using linux. Servers are Synology Diskstations and server is Windows server running on VMware ESXi 6.5 with PCI passthrough for GPU to support hardware transcoding.
As for dash or no dash in folder that really should not have any influence on what is being scraped a level further down. And Plex has no problem identifying the individual folders in the library and their corresponding files.
With regard to space vs . I will say same as above.
There’s no world in which that level of specificity in naming convention makes sense. Especially if it’s different between platforms. It would make moving from platform to platform a royal pain for no reason whatsoever.
Nor should the naming convention of a file one level up have any bearing on scraping of data further down the tree.
Especially not when above media is correctly identified and scraped.
As for “Other” vs “Others”, You are correct that the documentation states “Other”. But Other never (8 years or so ?) worked for me and “Others” did.
Other also did NOT work at the start of this thread when I tried re-naming everything just in case the code had been corrected to fit the documentation.
I can only assume that the documentation is incorrect.
We have a new “Plex Movie” Scanner+Agent which largely was written according to the specification laid out in the support pages.
Maybe “Others” did work with the old scanner. But it was never officially told that it does.
But now with the new “Plex Movie” scanner you cannot expect it to properly exclude folders which are not named like one of the listed local extras folders.
That’s totally fair.
Mistake happens and bugs are fixed that break implementations that rely on those bugs.
I have no issue with that.
But as I’ve now stated three times, re-naming the folders from “Others” to “Other” still does not have the desired effect.
Plex simply happily trashes all previously scraped from “Others” items and re-scrapes all newly discovered “Other” items.
So regardless of whether or not this was a bug that is now fixed it still doesn’t alter the fact that Plex does not correctly handle extra media regardless of the naming convention used.
This was fairly clearly stated in the original post.
Plex scrapes extra media as new stand alone movie titles rather as extra media belonging to a given movie title that it resides under.
That is and always has been my issue.
Not whether or not there was a typos in the documentation.
