When using Plex with Google Drive, there a few settings you should be aware of.
Settings: Library
- Scan my library automatically: unchecked
- Empty trash automatically after every scan: unchecked
- Generate video preview thumbnails: never
- Generate chapter thumbnails: never
Settings: Scheduled Tasks
I have everything unchecked apart from:
- Backup database every three days
- Optimize database every week
Stop Plex rescanning after changing Folder Names
Plex has an annoying habit when renaming Media folders that it wants to rescan, albeit a turbo scan. This can be a real pita when your media is a cloud mount.
But really if all you have done is renamed a folder, Why Plex sees the need to re scan I have no idea. But that’s Plex for ya.
So my suggestion (for Linux / Mac / Synology), take it or leave it. Is DO NOT point Plex Libraries Directly to your media, but use symlinks instead and point your Plex Libraries to these.
That way you can change names of your media folders, and then just change the symlink, keeping the same name but pointing to your new folder instead.
Command line scanning
Is another of those little used and little documented features.
Sometimes you want to use the command line scanner, this enables you to a bit more specific about what you want to scan. But can be a bit of a pain to get working.
The help page from Plex is here:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201242707-plex-media-scanner-via-command-line/
You can use that to see what you can do with it and how you would do it.
The problems is that these days this can only be run as the Plex user, if you try any other user you get no output.
On Linux (or at least on Ubuntu in my case) here are the steps to get it to work:
sudo su plex
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/lib
/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex\ Media\ Scanner --scan --refresh --section 1 -d /some/library/somefolder/anotherfolder/On a Synology NAS here are the steps to get it to work:
You need to become root before issuing the command then su to Plex but with a shell. or see the alternative hmm, this does not seem to work anymore!
the export line was wrong, should have been:
export PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR="/volume1/Plex/Library/Application Support"sudo su -
su plex -s /bin/bash or sudo -su plex
export PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR="/volume1/Plex/Library/Application Support"
/var/packages/Plex\ Media\ Server/target/Plex\ Media\ Scanner --scan --refresh --section 1 -d /some/library/somefolder/anotherfolder/Error Loading This Library
This is a pretty generic error, that does not give much in the way of clues as to what the problem is. I have found that it tends to happen when Plex is busy with scanning or other related background tasks.
So how do you know that plex is busy, I find the only way to see what is going is to look at the Plex logs, as looking in the interfaces, Plex Web, PMP etc, there it appears there is nothing going on. But if you look in some of the logs you will see that stuff is still going on.
I tend to have a few Terminal windows open tailing the Plex logs from my various servers. I have a few libraries that rely on local metadata, and the localmedia log has lots of looking for episode data requests, even though it looks from the outside that Plex is not doing anything.
The Plex Dance
And how could I forget this:
https://forums.plex.tv/t/the-plex-dance/197064
Why we have to defies logic, but there you go that’s Plex for ya.