So I made this incredible playlist, 400+ items long, featuring all the MCU films and television shows in chronological order. It was a lot of work but totally complete. And then, my sister went to watch it (using my login, of course, since we can’t share playlists) and discovered that several films that I know were in there, … weren’t. What the devil happened to them? They are still in the library and perfectly viewable, they were just excised from the playlist. Why? Can the app not handle a playlist that long? If so, whoo boy, is my It’s the End of the World as We Know It playlist (currently numbering 564 videos and 30 days viewing time) in trouble. What’s the deal here?
Maybe you created a self-updating, so-called “smart” playlist?
If you used a filter on your library to create this playlist, you usually get a smart playlist. (e.g. “Added within the last x days”, or “unwatched”)
You can discern smart playlists by the small “cog-wheel” icon on their thumbnail picture.
See [HowTo] Create Playlists (Updated for new UI) for an introduction to making playlists, “dumb” and “smart”.
There is a second possibility: if your media files are stored outside the server machine. And you have the checkbox “Empty trash automatically after every scan” enabled, then temporary slowness or connection delays can cause some files to get (temporarily) thrown out of your library. When that happens, they’re also removed from all playlists.
(Settings - Server - Library)
This is usually caused by hard drives, which are spun down to save power, and need too much time to spin back up.
Thanks for responding. I did a bit of research before posting this, so, in answer to both your questions: no, it’s not a smart playlist but a hand-selected group; and no, although the files are all stored on external hard drives, they are directly connected to the server machine via USB ports and hubs, and the option to automatically empty the trash is not, and never has been, activated.
I didn’t know there was a smart or dumb playlist feature. Usually what I do when I create a playlist (which I do all the time) . I just will click the “add to playlist” then it asks me if I want to ‘create new playlist’ then I name it. That’s how I’ve always done it… About 3 months ago, I noticed “some” of the playlist I had created like a year prior were still viewable but wouldn’t play…I had to delete those playlists and create them again.
I also notice playlists behave differently than they used to on Roku as far as looping the playlist. To be more clear - take a playlist with 120 videos. You go to the playlist - hit the main play button, start the playlist…but decide you want to go to video # 35. You can’t. (at least on Roku), you can scroll down the queue 21 videos at a time the first time…play video #21, once video #21 starts playing, from that point on, you can no longer scroll through the queue…the only reason this is a problem for me specifically is if you want a playlist to repeat over and over…you must start the playlist with the main play button… but often I will want the playlist to start in the middle…so if I start a random video from the playlist instead of the main playlist button, the full playlist won’t loop back to the beginning. I can see this not being an issue for 99.999999% of people, but it’s still buggy.
Still, it can happen if you start a ‘Scan Library Files’ with some of the drives sleeping. What then happens is that some of the posters on your library will have a trashcan icon on their posters.
If you then routinely ‘Empty Trash’, these “canned” movies get removed from the library.
These movies will then eventually be re-added to the library, in the next library scan.
If you remember one or several affected movies, verify the date they have been added.
You can use the sort option ‘Date Added’ or a Custom Filter ‘Date added’ showing movies added after you have created the playlist in question.
I understand your point; however, none of my drives were sleeping when I did library scans. I always make certain that all drives are loaded before I open the server after a reboot, as any sleeping drives can play havoc with the library, since Windoze 10 seems to love to re-assign drive letters on an arbitrary whim. None of the missing movies appeared in the main library with trashcan icons superimposed over them. They were present, unalloyed, and played perfectly when selected. They had merely been removed from the playlist, not from the library itself.
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