Rebuilt Storage, No Metadata Populating

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
1

Server Version#: 1.21.1.3830
Player Version#: Plex Web 4.47.3

Greetings,

I was wondering if you guys/gals had any ideas how to fix this?

I have a folder in my television library called “Looney Tunes (1929)”. In that folder I have meticulously named all the files according to thetvdb.org one by one. Some examples are…

S1930E02 Congo Jazz.avi
S1937E04 Porky’s Road Race.avi
S1945E15 The Bashful Buzzard.avi

Plex had scraped all this metadata before, but I updated my NAS and created new libraries (with new names) as well. Before I did anything, I scanned files, emptied trash, deleted bundles, etc… Just to be sure.

As I add most things back, it seems to be finding it with the exception of this Looney Tunes fiasco. I originally just put the whole 350 or so episodes back, but it scraped no metadata. I unmatched, matched again, etc… Nothing fixed it. So I removed it all, cleaned up again and added one season. It found it. Added another season, and it found it. Did that like 10 times and it found it all. Then I added back the rest in bulk and it stuck again. So I pulled the stuck seasons back out, cleaned everything again, but no luck now. Not even if I add one season at a time. It won’t scrape any more data for this series.

I’ve attached the logs…

It’s making me nuts. These exact same file names worked before, so it’s not that. I haven’t changed the structure, so I’m out of ideas here. Any help would be great.

Thanks,
Steven

Plex Media Server Logs_2021-01-25_17-23-13.zip (8.0 MB)

2

Havn’t looked at your logs, but I can tell just by looking at your files names they are not appropriately named, see Naming and Organizing Your TV Show Files | Plex Support

While Plex will do its best as I know there are a TON of Looney Tunes I imagine it eventually will give up. I had this same issue with other older TV shows that I assembled back before I personally cleaned up my filenames to Plex’s satisfaction. The newer scanners are faster and better at matching, but more picky about your filenames and some stuff that used to work just doesn’t anymore. Especially since you have a lot of files and your filenames and folder name are wrong, its having trouble keeping up once it goes deep enough I assume because Looney Tunes is odd even properly named.

Now specifically to how your filenames should be for Plex, to reference the above support article your format should be:

  • /TV Shows/ShowName/Season 02/ShowName – s02e17 – Optional_Info.ext

You mention thetvdb.org, but that is an alias to tmdb. I could not find Looney Tunes for this age on there. Did you perhaps mean thetvdb.com? I do see metadata that looks correct under Looney Tunes - TheTVDB.com and will move forward with the rest of this discussion assuming this is what you meant for sake of explicit examples. The general process holds up for whatever metadata provider your using.

Firstly, your shows folder name is NOT the name shown on the metadata provider. The show name, and therefore folder name, should be just “Looney Tunes” and not have the year included.

Jumping into a specific episode, I will use this one as you mentioned it above: Looney Tunes - Congo Jazz - TheTVDB.com. The seasons on this are odd for airdate as they were numbered by year, but it does appear to be entered as the season number. Per airdate ordering (which is usually the default) this is the second episode so your S1930E02 portion appears to be correct thankfully. The filename looks like it just needs to be expanded out to be Plex TV scanner appropriate. Per the Plex naming document it should be “Show Name - sxxexx - optional info.extension”. In this case your filename for that episode should actually be:

Looney Tunes - S1930E02 - Congo Jazz.avi

Your entire folder structure to reach this file should then look like:

/TV/Looney Tunes/Season 1930/Looney Tunes - S1930E02 - Congo Jazz.avi

Renaming your files to properly have the show name and the folders should fix the issue.

You can find rename helpers in various places (scripts, dedicated tools, etc). I suggest the easiest thing is to use a bulk filename replace script trying to replace “S19” with “Looney Tunes - S19” to hit bulk of older episodes and again with S20 instead of 19 to hit the last few seasons or so as I see it goes from 1929-2015 on thetvdb.com.

3

Good morning,

Thanks for the detailed reply. I appreciate it. I’m working on making some modifications to the folder/naming structure. I’ll post back how it turns out.

My biggest frustration here is this structure is not new. It always worked, and the “Looney Tunes (1929)” was born out of issues where there is more than one version of a series. Star Trek for example. The year is supposed to help Plex, not confuse it.

Even if the updated structure works, I’ll hold this as an issue with Plex, not my naming convention. As you state yourself, “The newer scanners are faster and better at matching, but more picky about your filenames and some stuff that used to work just doesn’t anymore.”

That’s not an “improved” scanner if what used to work, doesn’t anymore. LOL

I’ll let you all know how the updated structures work.

Thanks,
Steve

5

So I took all the Looney Tunes episodes out of the library, scanned again to update Plex. All of them were removed from Plex as expected.

I then added one season with two episodes back in the following structure, and scanned the library again.

Looney Tunes (1929)/Season 1930/S1930E02 Congo Jazz.avi
Looney Tunes (1929)/Season 1930/S1930E04 The Booze Hangs High.avi

I’ve now been waiting about 20 minutes while Plex is spinning and scanning for metadata for two episodes…

30 minutes… still spinning…

Plex

Getting frustrated, so I selected the only context menu available, which is “Match”. Does is not know what the match is after 30 minutes? So I selected the only result it gave which it was 100% confident in with “(1929)” in the folder…

Match
Match719×365 11.8 KB

Plex seemed stuck spinning, so I rebooted the server. Still no metadata, so I did fix match again… It’s spinning, and looking for metadata again… I’ll let you know if it ever finishes.

6

It found that season, even with the naming “not perfect” as everyone likes to blame. Quite honestly, if Plex can’t figure out what the show is with “Looney Tunes (1929)/Season 1930/S1930E02 Congo Jazz.avi”, I have no interest in using it anymore.

I’ll try adding more seasons and see if it chokes again.

7

With TV shows the issue is that it is taking the show name as something to match against the metadata provider. By including the year when it is NOT in the metadata provider you are breaking the scanners matching. TV and Movie scanners behave very differently, hence having different standards and mixing TV and movies just not really working.

To note your example of “Star Trek” that should also not have a year on it. The reason being each different Star Trek show has a different subtitle which is included:

For TV your show name, and therefore folder name, wants to exactly match your metadata provider. Star Trek should NOT have years, as they have distinct names and the metadata provider doesn’t have years in their official names. Referring in conversation to the 60’s show as “TOS” is just confirming you mean the original and are not shorthanding the title by not saying one of the subtitles.

Years are used where a show has the exact same name and needs to differentiate it, and the original show generally does not have a year. One of the best examples of this (especially as it has a large number of episodes which causes Plex scanner issues if not properly named so it gets asked alot in forums) is “Doctor Who”:

The “classic” has no year since it is the original, and the 2005 version has the year appended to differentiate it.

To your point of “still a Plex problem”, I get where you are coming from, and once its in database it will keep working as its keeping up links not trying to find and create them. But saying an unsupported config worked and then saying the system on update is now broken for not working with something it was never supposed to work with doesn’t quite make sense.

To try and reframe this ideal in a exaggerated example, say you had a car. If you were to fill that car’s gas tank with a mixture of gas and water, that is not how you should fuel it, but it may work. If you later replace that engine, complaining it used to work with watered down gas and the new engine must be terrible and faulty because it doesn’t is a bit silly.

8

There is an issue which has caused endlessly long library scan times.
The fix for that should be in the current beta.
The fix for the issue which required manual matching of newly added shows is also there.

9

Sorry you had posted these other ones while I was typing my other response.

…if Plex can’t figure out what the show is with “Looney Tunes (1929)/Season 1930/S1930E02 Congo Jazz.avi”…

But your a person, who can infer things. A computer has to be told EXACTLY how to handle it. The reason the standard exists is to narrow the variants that have to be accounted for so it can try and match to third part systems and cross reference it. People are very good at this, computers not as much. Since Plex isn’t requiring a trained neural net learning model with every person using it, they have a standard and that standard is what it is to effectively communicate the data to the system. If it doesnt meet the standard, it can cause odd behaviors. Plex’s rigidity is the trade off for having it be fairly low maintenance and “it just works” with properly organized data. Alternative media servers are more flexible but more hands on, Plex certainly isn’t for everyone.

10

These file names should work just fine, in my experience.

1 Like
11

Personally experienced this same kinda problem with Doctor Who ‘classic’, it would work alright for the first few hundred episodes but then have issues. When I changed them to include the shows name in filename it cleaned up matching and rescan performance

12

I got you… Trust me, I’m not trying to beat anybody up here. It just seems that I’ve provided enough information for Plex to figure it out at some point, and here we are.

Following what you explained above… I get that “(1929)” isn’t necessary. But once I click “Fix Match” and tell Plex that “Looney Tunes (1929)” is really “Looney Tunes”, it seems, well, looney, that Plex won’t now understand what S1930E02 is…

I’m adding the other 35 or so seasons now, and I’ll post back if it chokes. Stand by…

13

I’m guessing there are multiple issues here, and they are all new.

  1. Plex is no longer matching a series as well as it used to. You can get past that by fixing the match manually.

  2. Plex doesn’t like when there are hundreds of episodes in one folder.

  3. Scanning takes forever, and seems to time out before the scan is complete.

Even with the old (unchanged) files before I started, Plex would find some and not others. Sometimes removing and re-adding worked. If it is a naming issue, this should be irrelevant. If it can’t recognize the episode, taking it out and putting back shouldn’t change that. There is a larger issue occurring here.

Even with the old (unchanged) files, Plex would recognize that I had 38 seasons, it just wouldn’t scape metadata. This again seems to indicate it’s not a naming issue, but more connected to the number of episodes.

I have numerous other shows named just like the original Looney Tunes was, and they work fine. If it’s naming, why would only this one fail? The only difference is the amount of episodes, which leads me to believe it’s a “timeout” issue during the scan.

So I added all the seasons back and rescanned.

Tunes
Tunes899×504 230 KB

As you see, it scraped Information up to Season 1937, then stopped. Before I reorganized, it had scraped different seasons. I never renamed the files, just changed the folder structure. This is most definitely a Plex issue, and I’m not accepting that it is related to my file names. I’m putting them back as before. Just like every other show is named.

Unfortunately, the community default is to blame the user/file structure, but that is not the case here. Most users don’t meticulously rename 371 files to match what the scaper expects them to be named. When you take the time to do all that work and still experience issues, you have to question the limitations of the software.

14

Put them back as originally structured/named, and this time it scanned up to 1944 and stopped.

Seasons
Seasons999×501 261 KB

So where does one actually file a bug report?

15

I wonder: do you have the “Intro scan” activated to be executed right while new items are added?
If so, try and set it to only “as a scheduled task”.

Fetching metadata and detecting intros for such a massive number of episodes at once might produce too much load to be handled simultaneously by your server.

16

I did. I disabled it now…

Of course the more I try to fix this, the more I notice is broken… I found I was presented with the option to “upgrade matching” in my movie libraries, so I did. Now when I try to add a movie, nothing gets found. If I go to “fix match” and search using “Plex Movie”, they all say there are no matches.

So… you know… frustration is growing here.

17

That is a bad move in this situation. You should only do that after you have otherwise moved your library successfully.

Try performing “Refresh Metadata” on a few movies. If nothing major is breaking after doing so, do it for the whole library.

18

So I did the “dance” again with intro detection off. And waited a day or so to allow scheduled maintenance to happen also…

I added back one season, waited… It scanned and downloaded all the metadata. I added another, and it added that one successfully… So far, so good.

Then I dropped the other 36 seasons back and waited. It did exactly what it did before. The two seasons I added individually are now the only two with metadata. As before, I would have added several seasons and eventually it would just stop scraping.

Without getting engineers involved, this is clearly a problem with the new matching agent. This series wasn’t a problem when originally added. The only thing different now is the “new and improved” agent. It’s not working, and I’m not alone.

Match

19

did you update your server? as noted above there are tvdb agent fixes in 1.21.2.3943

20

Version 1.21.1.3876 is the latest currently available on my distribution. Running in a FreeBSD jail on TrueNAS.

21

Oh ok . FreeNAS folks need to finish their port then I guess.