My Music/TV Shows/Movies Aren't Showing Up

I'd like to use this topic to gather valuable information from you to help us improve the scanners so as to get your media into the library. This topic is NOT for you if you have your media in the library, but aren't getting any metadata (e.g. posters, art) for it.

Background information:

Plex Media Scanner log: ~/Library/Logs/Plex Media Scanner.log
Plex Media Server log: ~/Library/Logs/Plex Media Server.log
Location for crash reports: ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/

If your media is not showing up, there are two basic possibilities:

1. The way your files are named doesn't agree with the scanner.
   
2. The scanner is exiting/crashing on a particular item.
   
3. The missing item got merged with another item.
   

A few notes on how your media has to be set up (and more details here):

• Movies are the most liberal of all, most every video file should be scanned in.
  
• TV shows need *at least* a top-level show folder.
  
• Plex must be able to identify the season/episode from (a) the name or (B) MP4 atoms.
  
• Music must have either ID3 tags or M4A tags (at the moment).
  

Let's address the first one because it's the primary issue, especially for TV Shows. If most of your media shows up except a few shows or episodes, you can look at the Plex Media Scanner log (referenced above): [I've left in only the interesting lines]

Sep 05, 2010 10:25:33 [0xa043f500] DEBUG -     * Scanning directory /Volumes/Drobo2/TV Shows/Arrested Development/Season 1
Sep 05, 2010 10:25:33 [0xa043f500] DEBUG -       * Scanning Arrested Development Season 1 Episode 1
Sep 05, 2010 10:25:33 [0xa043f500] DEBUG -       * Scanning Arrested Development Season 1 Episode 2

That snippet from the log shows what you'll see for two episodes that are scanned in correctly. If you do NOT see those "Scanning" lines for episodes, they are not being scanned. If this is the case, I would like you to do the following:

Please post a reply to this thread with the full names of the folders and episodes not being match (e.g. "/Volumes/Backups/Downloads/24 - 8x12 - Day 8_ 3_00A.M. - 4_00A.M/24.s08e12.720p.hdtv.x264-immerse.mkv") That should be all the data we need for TV shows and movies.

Same thing if you're missing a movie or an album. Note though, for music, that the most likely culprit is not having ID3 tags. We'd love to work with developers to build better scanners, and since they are "pluggable" it would be perfectly possible to have one that scanned simply based on directory structure, e.g.

Now if you're seeing only the *first* X shows or movies scanned in, for example, and you seem to be missing the last half, then it's likely the scanner crashing or stopping for some weird reason. In this case, please note this in your post, and try to figure out which piece of media is causing the issue by looking at the end of the scanner log. You can temporarily move out a piece of media to try to identify the culprit.