I’ve found that folders (in series) with a large number of characters are being ignored by Plex. Is there a fix for this or will I have to shorten all the effected folders title lengths?
Could you post an example?
How many characters does the full path (counted from the root) have?
Thanks for your fast response.
The length of the folder title may not be the problem. I have a documentaries folder with 196 titles but only 156 are showing in the Plex library. I noticed that some of the missing shows had quite long folder titles and assumed that was the problem. But shortening one of the culprit folder titles didn’t solve the problem, on a rescan it still didn’t show in the library.
When I selected ‘Folder’ view in the Plex library all 196 titles were shown but when I selected the culprit folder and then the season sub folder Plex said ‘There are no items in this folder’ even though there definitely was an mp4 video file there which, when selected in windows played correctly.
This is the culprit video file path (title not shortened):
Z:\DOCUMENTARIES\Breakthrough Coronavirus Treating the Disease (2020)\Season 1\Breakthrough Coronavirus Treating the Disease (2020).mp4
Any ideas why this title isn’t being picked up by Plex?
Documentaries are a difficult topic.
The way you have the files named now, they will not show up in a Plex “TV Shows”-type of library at all. (For Plex, TV Shows are always serialized content)
And even in a “Movies”-type library, not all of them may get matched or may get matched incorrectly or matched together with similarly named files.
Because there are far more documentaries in existence. than there are records in the online databases. And they are also often re-titled if aired on another channel/network.
If you insist on proper matching and metadata downloading, you will have to research where the documentary in question is listed and how:
If it is listed at TheTVDB or TheMovieDB as a ‘tv show’, you will have to move it into a separate library of the type ‘tv shows’.
(TheTVDB has quite extensive ‘tv shows’ for e.g. BBC documentaries or ‘Cosmos’ or ‘National Geographic’ and the usual suspects. Look them up over there.)
If the docu is listed at TheMovieDB as a movie, you can leave it in the library of the ‘Movie’ type.
If all of that is too much effort for your taste, simply create a library of the type ‘Other Videos’ and move all your documentaries into there.
That way, they will not fetch any metadata, but they won’t at least all appear there (except those files which are named like a tv show).
Again, thanks for your fast response and suggestions.
Yes, I agree that documentaries are difficult for Plex to handle but I thought I had a work around by setting the library to TV shows and selecting ‘Personal Media Shows’ as the library agent. I used Tiny Media Manager to download the metadata for the series and then just downloaded poster images for the movies documentaries. This seemed to work fine with the movie documentaries showing only as one episode in the Plex TV library. However, this hasn’t totally worked as 40 documentaries are not being found by Plex using this method.
I think I will do as you suggested, create a new documentaries library set as ‘Other Videos’ and move them across - that should fix it. (Should “won’t” be “will” in the last sentence of your previous reply?)
Thanks for your help.
Try Breakthrough Coronavirus Treating the Disease (2020) - s01e01.mp4.
In addition to the Season xx folder, TV shows need SxxEyy in the file name.
See this post for an example. It is for fitness videos, not documentaries, but structurally the same.
Thank you FordGuy61,
Yes, of course that’s the obvious reason it wouldn’t read it! I just couldn’t see the wood for the trees - I labeled it S01E01 and it read it fine. Thanks again, that’ll save me a lot of time, well done.
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