I am trying to rid myself of the sample files showing up in scans under my “Movies” category. These files are named “Sample 1” and “Sample 2”. They are both 20mbs. They are recognized as movies (despite a run time of little over a minute). I want to remove these items. Honestly why isn’t this already available?
There is a complicated method (which, by the way, does not seem to work) using .plexignore. This really should be in the GUI, a simple “remove from scan”. The .plexignore file does not seem to work at all, or I am doing it wrong. I cannot simply name a file .plexignore without a filename. So I have used SPACE.plexignore ( .plexignore). In the file is only one line reading Sample. That is it. This does not work. Why does removing items from a scan need to be that complicated?
Moving the files elsewhere is simply not a solution.
According to this Help page, Plex should ignore your sample files, if indeed “sample” is in the file name, so you may have found a bug. You shouldn’t need to resort to .plexignore.
Yes. I have it seperated by types (Movies, TV shows, Documentaries, Bollywood, ect). This occurs in the file structure on the disk as well as in categories in Plex (movies, tv shows, ect). The files are literally named “Sample 1.mkv” and “Sample 2.mkv”. In the attached pictures, I have unmatched the movies they were recognized to be, now they just read “Sample 1” and “Sample 2”. It otherwise had it pegged as full movies.
A couple of points, your .plexignore.txt file is incorrect…
Many text editors (e.g. Notepad and Text Edit) will save files with a .txt extension by default. In such a case, you’ll need to manually rename the file to .plexignore exactly by removing the extension. (If you leave it as “plexignore.txt” or “.plexignore.txt” it will not work.)
In the image above showing the folder structure where in that structure do you have your Plex Movie Library pointed?
/six-nas
/Torrentz
/Plex
/Movies <- The Library should point to this folder
Movies. Each category is segmented according to type, and there is not cross over.
Movies in Plex only points to the Movies folder on the disk. The specific movie folder “Plex/Movies/Example Movie/” contains “Plex/Movies/Example Movie/Movie.mkv” and “Plex/Movies/Example Movie/Sample 1.mkv” and “Plex/Movies/Example Movie/Sample 2.mkv”, both of which are 20mb files.
And I believe I have done that with the .plexignore. When I save the file, it requires a filename. “filename.txt” is what it is saved as. I can change it to “filename.plexignore”, but the directions explicitly state “nothing more, nothing less”. But I can’t change the file to “.plexingore” in Windows, I get flagged. It requires some form of file name. So I added a space " .plexignore".
To be clear, Windows prompts me the file may become unusable (meaning I actually changed the extension, not added a “filename.plexignore.txt”)
@InoSiX said:
And I believe I have done that with the .plexignore. When I save the file, it requires a filename. “filename.txt” is what it is saved as. I can change it to “filename.plexignore”, but the directions explicitly state “nothing more, nothing less”. But I can’t change the file to “.plexingore” in Windows, I get flagged. It requires some form of file name. So I added a space " .plexignore".
To be clear, Windows prompts me the file may become unusable (meaning I actually changed the extension, not added a “filename.plexignore.txt”)
For how to create a file with a “.” prefix and with no extension see this link:
Wow, alright, so apparently I was doing it wrong. By using the method you provided via that link, the plexignore is now being ignored. Thanks for that. I had a " .plexignore" in that folder (with the space for the filename) but that did not work, and because I could not rename it to “.plexingore” with Windows flagging me, I could not think of another way.
That process should be a lot more intuitive however. It should be part of the GUI in much the same way “Match” is. Clicking “Ignore”, for example, would cause the file to be put on a blacklist (that could be interacted with in the GUI).
The .plexignore function really should not be concerned with the file name at all, and instead simply look for *.plexignore, at the very least.
Thank you for solving that problem.
Should I pass up the chain the Samples appearing in the first place? They are still files included in a larger movie folder. They are titled “Sample” and are 20mb, which should be ignored automatically.
