hi - I’m using a windows 10 desktop computer as my server that is LAN connected. My 3 TV’s in the house have Roku Plex app - Everything is working great and have used filebot to name everything and having used Plex for weeks now, I love it but I wanted to ask about something that happened yesterday:
Occasionally, when watching a TV show episode, I will notice something about the file that I want to change. I will rip the episode from DVD again and re-encode it, name it the exact same, replace the file in the folder, but I usually have to do the plex dance, removing the folder from TV shows, clean trash, bundles , add the folder back, plex collects metadata and then everything works…But with a particular TV show yesterday, when I did this (I removed the Mama’s Family) tv show folder completely from the add folder section of TV shows in Plex, but the show remained - I even went to roku and all files/metadata are still there, and the show still plays on every episode as if it’s still pointing to the drive , but it’s not…I’m not sure how this is possible and I have never seen this behavior until now. I even replaced the episode and put it back in the folder on the drive, and plex recognized the change instantly - so that show continues to play perfectly fine when it shouldn’t even be there? (confused) - Normally if I want to remove a TV show folder - I simply open the TV show library, delete the tv show, scan, plex notices and deletes it almost immediately - thenI clean trash/bundles and it’s totally gone - Not this time.
As far as folder structure on my 3 TB drive - I have 4 folders One for movies, One for TV Shows, One for Music, and One for Misc. In the TV shows folder, it’s structured so that when you open the main TV shows folder, you then see a list of all tv shows, when you open a particular tv show folder, you see all episodes listed (not separated folders by seasons) I realized that each season should have it’s own folder AFTER the fact, but since this has always worked flawlessly, I have left it alone so I wouldn’t have to do everything ALL over again. When I add a tv show to plex, I originally added them individually, not the entire TV show folder at once.
I also wanted to ask what to do if your internet goes out and you still want to watch plex? Thanks
Ok, even though I deleted the offending file from the plex TV shows folder, scanned, emptied trash , cleaned bundles…when I go to TV shows in plex, the show that I deleted is still there (I click one of the season and episodes then the …and /info and it shows the F drive path to the hard drive it’s actually on…I could remove it from the drive itself but I want to keep the show and add it back to plex since I just wanted to make a change. I guess I’m not understanding why when I remove the entire folder for that show from the TV Shows library, update, empty trash, etc, that it’s still there and working when plex shouldn’t even be able to find it…It’s like I didn’t even do anything when I remove the entire folder…Are you saying that I should delete the entire folder from my drive, then do the plex dance, then move the show back onto my drive from my backup drive?
OK wait, I just moved the mamas family folder back into my TV shows library - and on my roku, when I go to an episode, there are TWO play buttons. The top play button just plays the episode, but the button below that when I click it, it says play version 576p 1.3 mbps or 480p 1.1 mpbs. I don’t optimize shows because I only play them here at home, so I’ve never bothered to learn anything about optimizing, but could I have possibly inadvertently optimized this particular TV show or something? Would that cause this behavior? Thanks
Ok thanks - But I do have my folders separated on F drive. One folder for TV shows, One for Movies, One for Music, and One for Misc. When I add /remove TV show folders in the plex TV show library, I open the TV Show library folder on Plex, navigate to F drive/ TV Shows/Name of show, and add it to plex, then scan (this has always worked flawlessly).
I once optimized something just to see what would happen because I had never done it, and it placed a separate folder in the folder where the same item was I think it was called plex optimized. But I deleted that file and have never optimized anything since - since I never use Plex usually away from home (at least yet), I haven’t had the need to optimize anything… I guess it’s no big deal since I want the show to remain…
I will just try what you said and just remove the TV show in question completely from F drive and see what happens - I will add that after I unsuccessfully deleted the TV show from Plex, I added the folder back to the TV shows Plex library, then I removed it again, and that time it removed about 1/2 the episodes from each season, but not all of them…(so strange) - Then I added the folder back once again, and there all the episodes were there again (after a scan), only this time, they have two play buttons as if I optimized this TV show but there’s nothing optimized at all…
@mark40511 said:
Ok thanks - But I do have my folders separated on F drive. One folder for TV shows, One for Movies, One for Music, and One for Misc. When I add /remove TV show folders in the plex TV show library, I open the TV Show library folder on Plex, navigate to F drive/ TV Shows/Name of show, and add it to plex, then scan (this has always worked flawlessly).
This sounds suspiciously like what I did on the day I unboxed Plex, tried to use it and had all sorts of problems:
A TV Show Library/ <---------- Plex Library aimed here
…The Gong Show/ <---------- and here
…Season 01/
…Episodes
…The Price is Right/<--------- and here
…Season 01/
…Episodes
…Nature/ <-------------------------and here
…Season 01/
…Episodes
Well… it made sense to me at the time, but turned out to be: 1) a bad idea and 2) WRONG.
Here is the proper way:
A TV Show Library/ <---------- Plex Library aimed here (F:\TV Shows , for instance - without a trailing slash)
…The Gong Show/
…Season 01/
…Episodes
…The Price is Right/
…Season 01/
…Episodes
…Nature/
…Season 01/
…Episodes
Mine is F:\TV Shows\Name of Show\all episodes (There is no folder that separates seasons)
I haven’t had all kinds of problems at all. On the contrary - It has worked pretty flawless until this one show I tried to do the plex dance with. Since I want to keep the show on plex and the show is behaving correctly as is everything else, I’ve decided to leave well enough alone for now
I think the problem must be when I remove an existing episode from a TV show folder, and replace it with a new exact same file (named the exact same way). I’m a little OCD with my shows and I noticed when going through episodes of another TV show that I encoded a long time ago, one episode needed to be re-encoded, so I did this again (this time a different show from the one I mentioned earlier) - This caused the similar behavior - the episode I replaced now had an extra play button, asking which “version” I wanted to play. But I was able to successfully remove the entire show from plex (unlike the first one) and add it back and it’s now perfect.
While I’m here, I have another question about the Roku Plex app vs the Vizio Plex app. On the Roku app, when you’re in the middle of watching something, and you pull up the OSD to pause, rewind, etc, there is a loop button that will make whatever your watching play forever until you stop it, but on the Vizio app, that is not there. I thought that was strange but I guess there are different versions of the Plex client on different devices. using autoplay, occasionally I will notice that while using autoplay, when an episode ends, the next one usually will start with no problem (where you see the 13%/ 33%…, but sometimes it will get stuck at 13% and say (sorry there was an error playing the file) almost like the hard drive wasn’t ramping up in time. As soon as you try the file again, it plays…Not sure why this sometimes happens.
