Is there a known issue with movies with Flac Audio (Usually older 2.0 movies) refusing to generate Video Preview thumbnails?
I have around 3000 movies and have always known that a VERY small proportion don’t have VP Thumbs. When manually trying to generate them I see the usual message via the activity button but nothing actually happening (or progress in the console). So because of my OCD, today I used export tools to get a list of the offending movies with the intention of Plex dancing them. There are 42 of them. It seems more than a coincidence that 39 of them have Flac audio (export tools by the way told me that I have exactly 39 movies with Flac Audio), so 100% of my movies with Flac Audio refuse to generate VP Thumbs.
I bet it’s a coincidence and related to something else that’s the same for those 39 movies.
The command for extracting VP thumbs ignores audio completely, so I’m guessing it’s not the FLAC. Obviously it uses the Plex Media Transcoder but it’s something like this:
FFmpeg is a bit inconsistent about what it calls a keyframe. That means the -skip_frame:v nokey option Plex uses can cause FFmpeg to fail to extract preview thumbs on some media.
Nice one @Volts, I’m in evening time movie moving mode right now so will take a proper look at that linked thread in the morning.
I did briefly see that when failing the same message is screenshotted by someone in that link.
I also wondered if the failed ones are stored is some temp directory somewhere that could be cleared out? Anyway much appreciated and I will take a look in the morning.
IIRC the temporary files are extracted in the Media/localhost/N/guid.bundle/ directory, near the index-sd.bif itself. They might get cleaned up immediately upon failure though.
Take a look at my last post in that thread. There’s no harm in turning off the -skip_frame:v nokey option, it will continue to work on other files too, it just makes preview generation super slow.
When you’re bored please share a file or a few minutes of one with me. I’m curious if it’s the same issue with keyframes and GOP structure - or if it’s something else entirely.
