Server Version#:No Clue
Player Version#:Not to a player yet
Resume: 30 year IT tech managing networks of PCs and servers. Decided I needed Plex today, heard about it for year.
Problem: Just spent 3 hours trying to figure out why Plex server on a Windows 7 computer will not allow me to create a library with an .mp4 file in it. Read a bunch of stuff online, watched youtube videos. Renamed folders and files a bunch different ways, uninstalled/reinstalled.
So this is my hail mary on what I thought would be easy. I have a G: drive that is a USB western digital 4 GB drive. On the drive I have g:\video\TV Shows\Las Vegas\Season 01 In that folder, I have two .mp4 files created with Handbrake using settings from a YouTube video. I have created a library that points to the TV Shows folder. Plex server insists it’s empty.
@Alucard1’s suggestion is a good one. Your folder structure appears to be fine, but double check your file names to ensure that they’re something Plex can deal with. Plex expects episodes to be named using the following template:
Series Name (year) - SxxEyy - Optional Info.ext
Series Name = The name of the series as it appears in the online database backing the agent you’ve chosen for the library.
(year) = Sometimes needed, to disambiguate multiple versions of a series (Battlestar Galactica, for example)
xx = The season number.
yy = The episode number.
Optional Info = Not required, but can be used for the episode name.
ext = The file extension.
In your case, a reasonable file name might be:
Las Vegas - S01E01 - Pilot.mp4
Plex expects the name to be in this format so that it can match it to an online database and pull appropriate metadata. If it can’t find a match with a high enough confidence, the file isn’t added to the library.
If you’d like a free-form video library, where no matching is performed, you can create a library of type “Other Videos.” In fact, you may want to try that as a test, just to prove to yourself that Plex can indeed see the files.
No, that’s the “Optional Info” in the template. Neither the scanner nor the agent use it for matching or metadata population. It’s generally used for the name of the specific episode. In the case of Las Vegas, season 1, episode 1 was the pilot.
Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that you move to using an Other Videos library as a solution; I just meant it as a test to rule out any sort of permissions/access issues and to ensure that Plex Media Server could actually read the files. You should be able to configure a TV Shows-type library for any broadcast series.
Pilot is the name of the episode. It’s not essential for Plex to identify video content.
The most crucial information is 1) name of the show/movie; 2) season/ep information i.e. S00E00 VERY IMPORTANT 3) year (for TV it’s the first year it came on air).
The episode name is mostly for you to quickly identify an episode when looking at filenames.
I highly recommend using free tools such as
to rename all your media files to ensure compliance with Plex. It’s also great for file management in general.
