Server Version#: 1.20.0.3125
Player Version#: 4.34.4
NAS: WD PR4100
Hi all. I’m a total noob with all this – I started my Plex journey a few weeks ago by using my PC as a testbed, ripped a few of my Blu Rays onto it and everything seemed good: I was happily streaming to my Firestick 4K, so I got a lifetime Plex membership and bought myself a WD PR4100 so I could store my DVD collection on it.
I had a few little niggles with setting up the NAS and Plex, but managed to get it running quite well eventually.
I was using this folder structure: \Share\Films\ then a folder for each film using the title of the film, then in each film folder I had a folder named “Sample” (because I read that Plex ignores folders with “Sample” in the name), and was moving film special features etc into that folder because I was ripping the Discs in their entirety using MakeMKV (no encoding afterwards), and only wanted Plex to recognise the main Title.
On my PC, Plex seemed to ignore the files in this Sample folder, so I was happy. But then I got to thinking: because I was ripping the films straight into the library folder and then moving the files I wanted ignored into the Sample folder I thought maybe Plex was generating Preview Thumbnails for all of the items I wanted ignored before I had the chance to move them into the Sample folder - sometimes I’d leave MakeMKV doing it’s thing and go out or whatever.
Then I got to reading that you can use .plexignore files, so I swapped my Sample folder process for that process. During this process I then thought, “What if there’s loads of old data and thumbnails stored that are just hogging space? Now that I know about.plexignore etc, maybe I can start again properly…”.
So, in my effort to start again, I’ve Plex Danced numerous times, reinstalled Plex numerous times and also accessed SSH to delete things. Bear in mind that, although I’m IT literate and actually work in IT, I’ve never done anything like this before – quite comfortable with DOS/Command Prompt and have used that for years, but never used SSH.
So, after my first reinstall of Plex, I pointed Plex back to my Films folder and, hey presto, the films appeared with library Thumbnails a little all too quickly and the Plex Scan took a few seconds and stopped. I had 1.3Tb of films in there at this point. I thought that that can’t be right, there’s obviously some residual data there that it’s looking at.
So, after a couple more reinstalls and running through of WD’s instructions on how to delete Plex, I thought I’d try it again with just one film. I also checked with SSH that all the folders (if they’re called that in SSH), had been deleted. I created all new folders on my share and moved my films to those before reinstalling Plex, went through Plex set up without adding any libraries, turned on Thumbnail generation and set up a new library and had it point to an empty folder on my share, made sure everything was running ok, then copied Avatar into the folder.
The Library thumbnail appeared pretty much instantly, Plex scanned for a few seconds and then nothing. I’ve tried analyzing the file, deleting thumbnails, scanning the library, cleaning bundles, optimizing the database, everything - I can’t get thumbnails to generate for even this one film.
I am literally at my wits end and what should have been a really exciting challenge has turned into a serious dent in my mental health. Any help is very much appreciated!
