Thumbnails - what else can I try?

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#: 1.21.1.3830 release 11.3-RELEASE-p14
Player Version#: 4.47.3

  • Most thumbnails for Movies are showing (but not all)
  • Thumbnails for TV Shows are blank
  • Video preview thumbnails for Other Videos are blank

I searched the forums, and based on the advice I found, I already:

  • Restarted the server
  • Refreshed all metadata (Manage > Libraries > TV Shows > vertical ellipses)
  • Enabled video preview thumbnails (Manage > Libraries > TV Shows > Edit > Advanced)
  • Scanned Library Files (Manage > Libraries)
  • Enabled Scan my library automatically (Settings > Library)
  • Ran generate video preview thumbnails (Settings > Library)

But my TV and Other Video thumbnails are still blank.

What else can I try to get them to show up?

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Does Plex write to a log file? Perhaps it contains error messages that shed some light on the issue.

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Info on accessing server logs can be found here. https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250417-plex-media-server-log-files/

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Thanks. Found the log files. No interesting errors except many occurrences of this: Exception caught while attempting to match metadata on item 6651: Error parsing file

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that sounds like a matching error (doesn’t seem to like the filename/path), it would not affect all the other thumbnails.

to find unmatched content, go to each library and choose the unmatched filter, from there you can navigate to the item (movie/show/artist/album/whatever) and attempt to ‘match’ it via the 3 dot context menu.

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as far as the video thumbs, make sure the server options are set to your preferences:

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AFAIR, the thumb generation is not user triggerable, only happens automatically during the background tasks window. (or when new content is added, if so configured)

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you can view the main system logs real time via the plex web > settings > console
you can download all the logs from plex web > settings > troubleshooting > download logs

I don’t know if all the thumbs are logged there, but there is a 'scanner chapter thumbsnails.log` log you can review within the zip

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Thanks. Filtering by “Unmatched” in TV Shows leaves only two foreign language shows, the rest are hidden presumably because they were matched. But still no thumbnails.
I do see a bunch of these:

Dec 31, 2020 02:55:26.922 [0x809616000] ERROR - Error creating directory “/Plex Media Server/Media/localhost/2”: Permission denied
Dec 31, 2020 02:55:26.922 [0x809616000] ERROR - Error creating directory “/Plex Media Server/Media/localhost/2/8b1109ab733aafc440f704579f6bfdea6189479.bundle/Contents”: Permission denied


but they are all from yesterday 2:55 a.m, and yesterday I was still wrestling with FreeNAS, users, groups, permissions, and ACLs.

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Bingo, I think you have identified the problem, permissions.

Make sure whatever user that pms runs as, owns the plex application and data folders.

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The “\Plex Media Server” directory exists, and it has several subdirectories and many files. That suggests that permissions are not lacking.

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there are 2 plex directory tree’s.

there is the application and binaries, typically at

  • /usr/lib/plexmediaserver

and then there is the plex data, typically at

  • /var/lib/plexmediaserver

make sure the plex data folder is owned by user plex.

assuming you are not running a container or running some kind of custom over ride, try

sudo chown -R plex:plex /var/lib/plexmediaserver (or wherever the plex data folder is located on your server)

it may take a little while if your plex data is large.

in any case, the log is law
 the running plex process cannot create the folder (which is the folder for your thumbs), because access is denied.

so fix the permissions however you need to.

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Well it looks like everything under /Plex Media Server/ is owned by user plex.

How do I get Plex to retry those “Permission denied” operations?

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i’d suggest making the background schedule 23 hours (ie 2 am to 1 am), then restart pms.

after your thumbs start/finish getting generated, you can reset the schedule to whatever is best for your server.

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I changed the schedule as you said, and it seems to be working. It’s generating thumbnails, albeit very slowly. About 14 secs per video thumbnail. is that normal?

So the problem appears to have been that after I fixed permissions, a scheduled thumbnail task needed to run to see the change.

I’ll leave it crunching overnight, and report back.

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18h and still going


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It’s done. Took a while. I now have video thumbnails
 for about 90% of the videos.

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That’s not unexpected. The VPT generation process decodes the entire movie, extracting a frame every 2 seconds.

You are talking about Video Preview Thumbnails, right? The way you describe them in your first post made me think you were referring to Posters.

VPTs appear in video players, during playback, while you are scrubbing/seeking to a new location:

Posters are what you see while browsing your library, looking for something to play.

If you had a permissions problem, you may have fixed both. :slight_smile:

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I’m talking about the still video frame used to represent a video in the library view.

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Those are Posters!

Is everything working now, after fixing permissions and giving it a day?

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It’s mostly working. I’m missing about 10% of the generated posters. But that sounds like different problem. I will do some research (reading the logs) and open another thread if I can’t figure it out.

Thanks all!

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