u/Janus21

I have a TV series that Plex refuses to display in the library.

A British TV series from earlier this year called 'Alice and Steve' consists of a single season of six episodes. Each episode is about half an hour long. I used the same folder structure I've used for other TV Series:

This is stored in my 'TV Stuff' folder on my Synology NAS, along with other folders of TV shows that Plex shows correctly in the library and allows me to select and play, as should be normal. For this show, however, once the file transfer into the library folder is complete, Plex doesn't update to show the content in the way that it does for every other series. I can click on the library header in the home panel and request it to 'Scan Library Files' and see the orange swirl 'busy' indicator around the Activity icon at top right, but the folder never appears. I've added other shows and episodes after this one and they all appear in the library as normal following the scan.

By default, I have the library display as 'TV Shows', in the order of 'By Last Episode Date Added' so I can see newly added shows and episodes and, until this particular series, it all worked well. (I have to manually select the 'Scan Library Files' before newly added shows will display, whereas some time ago, I'm sure they used to appear automatically as Plex detected an addition to the library. This is currently how the Movie library works, but those files are stored on the same NAS volume as the Plex app is located, on a different volume on a different NAS box to the TV Show. I've put that minor inconvenience down to the different volume location or to some subtle feature I overlooked in one of the previous updates to the Plex server app and I mention it here for the sake of completeness).

If I change the display option to show my TV library by folder, I can see the top-level folder for the show itself, and the subfolder 'Season 01 (2026)' underneath it, but when I click on the subfolder, I get the message 'Empty Folder. There are no items in this folder'. Similar subfolders for other shows in the library display their contents, with a thumbnail, episode name, Season number, running time and a short description of the episode for each file in the folder.

The episode files themselves are perfectly visible in the Windows 11 File Explorer when I drill down to the folder on the NAS and will play normally in any Windows video player that I tried.

I thought there must be something wrong with the files I'd downloaded, so I moved them from the NAS Server and downloaded a fresh set from a different source. The first set were 1080p HEVC MKV files, encoded with a bitrate of about 1.3 mb/s and ran to just less than 300Mb per episode. The second set, from a different source, were also 1080p MKV files, but AVC encoded with a bitrate of around 6 mb/s and ran to about 1.2Gb per episode. Both profiles are not unusual for the other programs in the library. Both give very similar results in the Windows-based player, whether they're run from the NAS folder or from my PC's local HDD. The new folder, however, when copied to the NAS server folder following the same naming convention as above, are not recognised or displayed by the Plex server app - v 4.159.0 running on a Synology NAS, if it's relevant, and behaving well in all other aspects. I have a lifetime Plex Pass.

The folder and filenames I've chosen agree with the listing for the show on both IMDB and THETVDB.com. Out of desperation, I even tried changing the word 'and' for an ampersand and rescanning the library, but the whole show continues to remain invisible. There's another similarly named show called 'Alice & Jack' from 2024 that's in the same folder list. Thinking Please might somehow be confusing and conflating the two, I moved it from the NAS volume to my local HDD and re-scanned the library. 'Alice & Jack' disappeared as the scan progressed but nothing appeared to replace it. Moving 'Alice & Jack' back to the NAS volume and re-scanning made it reappear in the library as normal.

That's it. I'm stumped!

Can anyone think of anything I might have overlooked that I'm doing wrong or suggest a tweak that might get this folder to display correctly? My head is a little sore at this point from scratching it. (If it's something staring-me-in-the-face obvious and I've missed it, please be gentle with me)

Thanks for reading this far.

Steve

no relation :)

Plex won't display a TV show in the library after uploading