[el escapo]

EDIT: the title for this thread isn't accurate-- I'm sure the documentation isn't wrong, but the steps aren't working as they are supposed to. Please help!

Hi all,

Ok, I've been wrestling with this for the better part of a day and night. I'm just starting up with Plex... I've spent the last few months ripping all of my DVDs and organizing everything on external storage. Yesterday I started the process of bringing everything into Plex, and the process of scraping has been nothing short of maddening. I've had issues with both movies and TV shows, but it's the TV shows that I'm stuck on so I'll talk about that first. I've searched high and low in the forums and haven't found anyone with this particular problem-- most people seem to be able to scrape something, at least.

When organizing all of my data, I have taken great pains to match the hierarchy recommended in the documentation. Here is an example:

/_Series_Documentary/ (source root)
-->/The Blue Planet/
---->/Season 1/
------>The Blue Planet S01E01.vob
------>The Blue Planet S01E02.vob
-->/The War/
---->/Season 1/
------>The War S01E01.vob
------>The War S02E02.vob

With this structure, absolutely nothing scrapes. The download window flashes for an instant, and the TV show library stays empty. theTVDB is up; I have checked several times during this process. Each time that I have tried again I have been careful to remove the source and add it again. I've tried both TVRage and IMDBtv and they give only bizarre results-- nothing but a few episodes of a show unrelated to what I'm scraping. I've tried small subsets of my TV collection in test folders with no change in results. I took a look at the plex.log and saw this from the same time stamp:

15:24:36 T:2958422016 M:3034202112 ERROR: Server returned: 404 Not Found
15:24:37 T:2958422016 M:3034329088 NOTICE: My Videos: Scanning for video info using worker thread, operation took 00:01

Based on this, it seems like a server error... but there's a twist. I'm not going to throw my hands in the air and blame TVDB, so I started playing around.

If I add the individual TV series folders, each as its own source root, IT WORKS. At least, most of the time.

-->/The Blue Planet/ (source root)
---->/Season 1/
------>The Blue Planet S01E01.vob
------>The Blue Planet S01E02.vob

Voila. Thumbs, fanart, synopsis, theme music. This isn't supposed to be the way to do it, and I'm not looking forward to adding each TV series as a separate source, but it's the only way that I can get anything to scrape in TV.


I also mentioned trouble with movies, so here's the kicker. Last night I was having a similar problem, when I started this whole process with my movie folders. All of my movies are DVD rips, stored in VIDEO_TS folders. All ~300 scraped as the same movie, something in French that is totally unrelated to anything I own. So, I started experimenting with different folder configurations, settings, etc., and what finally worked was *unchecking* the "Use folder names for lookups" option even though both the documentation and several forum posts *specifically* point out that it must be checked for VIDEO_TS folders.

So basically, I have to second-guess the scraper, and do everything wrong so that it will come out right. A few shows so far still haven't worked correctly, but that may be because of the unrelated issues that other people have posted about.

My question is this: Is anyone else having these problems? Is it always this difficult? I don't want to add each TV series individually, and it seems that I'm not supposed to.

My system:
Mac Mini (late 2009)
Mac OS X 10.5.8
Plex 0.8.5
External storage: Data Robotics Drobo 4x2TB, set up as 3 2TB volumes. Firewire 800.

Thanks in advance.

~b.

[Raindancing]

Well, that definitely isn't the way it's supposed to work.

What I would suggest (it's generally the best thing when faced with bizarre behavior by Plex) is to delete the folder ~/Library/Application Support/Plex, and restart from scratch. You could keep going the way you are since it does work (however oddly) but I wouldn't want to have to add a source for each series, and I would guess that this odd way may not be reliable enough to count on in the future.

Heck, as long as you're trashing everything, I would also throw away the Plex.app, and download a fresh one. Not that it should matter, but it can't hurt.

[ctjunker]

Try adding a "-" (no quotes) in between the series title and the season/episode numbers and see if that works.

I just created the Blue Planet setup you have listed using dummy vob files and everything scraped fine with theTVDB

Here's proof:




Are you sure you have the source folder set up properly, with theTVDB selected? Maybe you accidentally forgot to hit ok.

[GSX]

I was having problems last night too. I wonder if it was related?

I have heard that TVDB can go offline and scraping won't work.

I spent a few hours last night trying to scrape some shows and nothing was working, and then suddenly it worked!

I don't know how but it did.

[el escapo]

ctjunker, on 01 February 2010 - 09:12 PM, said:

Try adding a "-" (no quotes) in between the series title and the season/episode numbers and see if that works.

I just created the Blue Planet setup you have listed using dummy vob files and everything scraped fine with theTVDB

Here's proof:




Are you sure you have the source folder set up properly, with theTVDB selected? Maybe you accidentally forgot to hit ok.

Yeah, I checked many times over to make sure that I was doing it correctly-- that's why it was so maddening.

Whatever the issue is, it must be something that is particular to my setup, since I was having trouble scraping both Movies and TV. Here's an example of the strangeness I was dealing with: When I first started scraping Movies and it was returning a bunch of junk results, one of the things that I tested was changing the name of the source folder itself, so instead of "Feature_Asia" it was "TEST". The name of the source folder shouldn't matter, right? Well, it changed the name of the movies that it found (still totally incorrect), but it did so consistently, and for each new folder name I tried (TEST2, TEST3, etc.) it found a different, consistent, and incorrect set of names for the movies within that folder. It was as if it was somehow using the name of the source folder, or perhaps even the whole path, in its IMDB queries. When I *unchecked* "Use Folder Names for Lookups" it found the correct movies, EVEN THOUGH the folder names were the only place that the true movie names could be found.

In the end, I added each TV series as a separate source, and I am fully prepared to regret this...

[jayman978]

This is a total shot in the dark but any chance your drive is an external drive formatted with fat32? There have been examples in the past where using fat32 has screwed things up. We've never really investigated it as there have only been a few isolated incidents. Can you take a screencap of your folder structure and source setup inside of Plex. I know you posted some of that in your first post but I'd like to see it first hand.

We could take this a step further and you could download the Plex System Reporter so we can get a more indepth view of your setup. You can find that app here: http://james.plexapp...ystem-reporter/