Recording new episodes for shows that already exist in another library -> missing show?

General Discussions Plex Features
21

Just to make sure the naming conventions are being honored, have you thought about temporarily combing the 3 episodes and rescanning the library? You also may have to Unmatch/Match the series/show. This would be interesting. You could do it once in the TV Shows (go thru the process of scanning/umatching/matching) and see what happens. Next move it to the Recorded TV Shows library and repeat. Maybe this will provide some insight regarding whether this is just a big bug and/or there are naming issues?

I have never split the same show/series into multiple libraries. Even if I own, for instance, season 1 of a series and then I record the other seasons, I still have it all in one library. I have not had the opportunity to run into this issue.

22

Rescanning the library didn’t fix the issue, but moving the file (on the filesystem) from the Recorded TV Shows library into the same folder as all of my other Big Bang Theory Season 11 files made it show up properly.

23

Ok, that’s strange. So I moved the original file in the filesystem from my TV Shows library back to my Recorded TV Shows library and it recognized that the file was there and the season and show appeared properly. The unwatched counter is also now correct for that show. The other shows still aren’t correct, but it makes me wonder if somehow I got some bad data in the plex metadata DB that made it think the file was in the TV Shows library rather than the “Recorded TV Shows” library. I’ll keep an eye on this for now and report back after another episode records to see if the issue persists.

24

@jalsk said:
Rescanning the library didn’t fix the issue, but moving the file (on the filesystem) from the Recorded TV Shows library into the same folder as all of my other Big Bang Theory Season 11 files made it show up properly.

So it’s not a naming convention issue. It appears to be a bug in the way Plex is handling the fact that you have the same series/show in 2 different libraries. If you move 1 of the episodes (maybe the [11x1] episode) back to the other library by itself, then do the rescanning/matching, what disappears?

25

So I managed to fix all of my episodes by moving the relevant files on disk over to my TV Shows library, letting plex reindex them, and then moving them back to my Recorded TV Shows library. At that point it recognized the shows and the unread counts updated properly. Not sure what the issue was, but it makes me wonder if the point earlier in this thread about post-processing scripts might have something to do with it. The script is super simple, just moves the file over to a file share and waits for the processed file to show up in the ‘done’ directory, polling every 2 minutes. The shows process successfully, but I wonder if it’s causing issues with the Plex DB in the process.

26

Just for the sake of completeness, here’s my script to transcode.

#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
    echo "USAGE: $0 <file to transcode>"
    exit 1
fi

TRANSCODE_DIR="/data/Media/transcode"
DVR_FILE="${1##*/}"
DEST_FILE=`echo $DVR_FILE | sed 's/\.ts$/\.mkv/'`
DESTPATH="${1%/*}"
mv "$1" "$TRANSCODE_DIR/queue"
while [ ! -f "$TRANSCODE_DIR/done/$DEST_FILE" ]; do
    sleep 120
done
mv "$TRANSCODE_DIR/done/$DEST_FILE" "$DESTPATH"
27

My guess is that you created the Record TV Shows library after the TV Shows library. When it looks for a match for the series, it assumes (bad idea) that there will only be one match. If multiple matches are returned, the first match is what is used (since it isn’t expecting more that 1 match). By only having a single library with all the episodes, you always only get one match returned and things work as expected.

I don’t think this is really a DVR issue, but simply an issue with the way Plex organizes and matches media, regardless of how the media was created.

28

Ah, that would make sense. Do the Plex devs watch this forum? Sounds like this is a bug that would be nice to have fixed.

And yes, I did create the Recorded TV Shows library after the TV Shows Library. I only recently started recording content, but have had TV shows in Plex for quite a while.

29

As an after thought, why do you care whether a TV show is recorded or something else? Why split up the media?

30

I’m fairly new to the MCEBuddy/Comskip world and still don’t entirely trust it and/or my setup, so I wanted to make it more clear that “this media might be wonky”. I suppose I don’t really need two libraries, but here we are. I actually thought mid-way through troubleshooting this that it may be easier to just add an extra folder to my list of watched paths for the TV Shows library and call it good. Then everything is also in one place rather than having shows split across multiple libraries.

31

Having a single TV Shows library with multiple folders is what I do (see my screenshot earlier in this post). I record to one folder, move it to another folder after MCEBuddy processing, and finally have a third folder that I move stuff to once I am assured that all is good. I also have MCEBuddy move the unprocessed file to another folder (not defined anywhere in Plex) after MCEBuddy processes a file. Every so often I sort the archive folder by date and whack half of it. Occasionally when I first started using MCEBuddy, I would be adjusting settings and reprocess files. Having the file in the archive folder was handy.

32

@jalsk Here are my thoughts and my configuration. I have a similar process to what @rodgerzeisler explained with his.

With Plex DVR you can specify multiple drive/folder locations for your media. You could have one library with several different folders for storing media. My TV Show library has 4 different folder locations:

shs8ci88590w.png736×534 50 KB

F:\Recorded TV - is where files are placed after mcebuddy finishes processing
E:\Dropbox\A-Plex Cloud\TV_Shows - recordings of shows wife and I really like are moved to a folder on my dropbox account. This folder is sync’d with Plex Cloud Server so we can access from anywhere without needing to connect to Plex Server on home computer.
F:\Recorded TV_HEVC - recordings after converted to h265 or HEVC.
G:\TV_DVR - recordings are initially done in this location before being moved by mcebuddy to F:\Recorded TV.

There is no reason you couldn’t have one TV Shows library with both /data/Media/movies/TV Shows and /data/Media/dvr/tv. This will allow you to keep your ripped TV Shows separate from the DVR recorded ones. This will also allow Plex to know which episodes you already have and not record them if you are wanting to fill in missing episodes. When I first started with Plex last year I setup 2 different libraries, one for recordings that were already processed and one that episodes were recorded to and then processed. So one DVR TV library and one TV Shows library. Similar to what you have now. What I found is that Plex was recording every episode, even ones I already had in the TV Shows library because I was recording to DVR TV and that library did not have the episode.

Your moving files out of Plex and letting the library update, then moving them back sounds like the Plex Dance process. When I had the 2 libraries I found I occasionally had to do basically the same thing.