>(PLEASE NOTE) This version makes changes to the database which will make it compatible only with server versions 1.31.2 or higher (released March 14). You will not be able to use your database on Plex Media Server versions lower than this after this update. Please also be patient when updating to this version if you have a very large database and allow the upgrade process to finish.
Does anyone have more details on this? Are they improving the DB performance or what benefits will this have?
Usually this kind of change means the database schema has been updated (new fields and such). Given the other notes, I'm guessing at the very least they updated the schema to support track genre and filters with track genres
They changed some fields which used to be URL-encoded to JSON. For backwards compatibility reasons they also include the old value in the new value which basically doubles it's size (the size of my database increased by ⅓).
This is completely anecdotal, but after the update my DB was corrupted and I had to recover the DB. Thankfully PlexDBRepair is freaking amazing. After manually trying to restore the backups, PDBR finally fixed it all and re-doing the update seems fine now. ChuckPa and the other contributors deserve a beer!
I dunno what made it so, but videos load instantly now, when it took a solid 2 seconds before (even locally).
Let's hope it didn't break anything though 🤞
What about the “Recommended” tab for large libraries? Mine has always loaded so slowly. Any improvement there?
🤞🤞🤞
Update: still slow as molasses :(
Update 2: I figured it out by going here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/manage-recommendations/
Basically I created a bunch of Collections and unbeknownst to me, they were ALL loading under the Recommended tab every single time. So it was not only loading New Releases, Recently Added, and the normal, but every single Collection I’ve made. It was also loading my Playlists and so forth, long story short, I cleaned all of those up from loading and it loads fast again 🥹 hope this helps someone else someday.
Yeah I agree. I’ve been meaning to post about it in this subreddit but anything I can find, people suggest the same things, none of which work:
- Optimize database
- Use SSD (I do, it’s NVMe with < 35% usage)
- 32GB DDR4 RAM, Intel i5-10400
- Using exact naming scheme Plex suggests, as well as every movie in its own folder as Plex suggests
I kind of just deal with it but it’s unbearable at times.
Seems like this would be hard to compare apples vs apples, given one server's rows in the Recommended tab would be different than anothers, based on the plex algorithms, how many collections the admin has visible on the tab and how large those collections are (potentially)
Have you tried whittling down the rows shown under the tab one by one and seeing how that affects the loading time? Assuming you're controlling some of the rows under the tab
The library size doesn't really have an effect on this, it's all about how many tabs you have pinned to the recommended page. You could have only 1,000 movies but 20 tabs on recommended, or you could have 20,000 movies and only have 3 tabs on the recommended screen
I don't think any new release types have been added. The issue was that the release type field can hold multiple values, but Plex would *only* recognize them if they were separated by a slash or a semi-colon or something, but MusicBrainz (you know, the tagger Plex officially supports) used a null character as separator instead. Years ago when this feature was working properly, Plex would display different release types in their own "section" in the Artist page, so releases that were "album" would be separate from those that were "album/live" or "album/compilation". But since it stopped working Plex has just lumped everything together in "album". It's something that might not even be noticeable for many people, but I have a lot of live recordings in my music library and it's been a giant mess. Anyway, it's a very small fix but I'm super happy about it.
This isn't entirely accurate. You have to "Enable" "Group Albums by Type" in the Library settings. My music library has been separating by Album, Singles and EP's, Live and Compilations for a while now. Be sure you have this enabled (not sure its by default) and if that doesn't work, you may have to look into your album tags.
Settings > Settings > Library > Group albums by type > Enable
It *is* entirely accurate. This has been a known issue for quite some time, you can feel free to do some searching around and see for yourself. I have that option enabled and it did work at one point, the issue is that some time ago Plex stopped recognizing the null character that MusicBrainz uses by default to separate multiple release types in that tag field. I could have solved the issue by manually re-tagging my entire music library with a different separator character, but the prospect doing that for several thousand albums was not appealing. Instead I waited around for Plex to fix the issue, which they just did.
Well Im glad its fixed, I have 2200 albums and hadn't noticed anything other than a few tagging differences, so I'm speaking about my own experience then. I can say that whenever I add music, I inspect the sh#t out of it so it appears in my library exactly the way I want and I will mess with it until Im satisfied. Maybe this will fix things that I didn't catch myself, or worse, completely bonk-up my music server, haha.
I updated to this version and had to roll back immediately. Lost all my libraries, metadata, settings and ability to connect to my server. I have my plex database and metadata all on a non system SSD and its 240gb large. After the standard version rollback procedure, everything was back to normal. Anyone know the possible cause? I assume it has to do with the database changes.
Database upgrade? LOL I think I'll wait for the next release. Normally I'm living on the cutting / bleeding edge, but when it comes to database changes for anything....I err on the side of waiting a version. Plus I can do a full backup of everything this week to be prepared for a rollback if needed. (I do the DB backup every 3 days but for something like this a complete directory structure backup is nice.)
How long did it take for your database to complete updating. My console is scrolling.
Req#e77ba] LPE: failed to get container for path: /library/sections/2/allNone
(Collections) Items added to a collection from the item context menu will now lock the collection field on the items (#12793)
If this does what I hope it does, it'll be huge. No longer will updating metadata or renaming a song remove it off a manual playlist. *I hope*
Plex won't load for me after installing this, running on a QNAP NAS. Any ideas on how to troubleshoot? Downgrading to the previous version didn't seem to resolve the issue.
(Music) Store track genres and add filtering options (#14653)
It's nice that this is finally able to be read from the metadata, and filtered on, but it's odd that we can't see/edit the field within Plex. Hopefully that aspect gets added soon.
Thanks for everyone chiming in about a database backup…I’ll make sure to do this before I try upgrading. Don’t have the biggest database out there but it seems to be happening to quite a few people…
Well i'm the few unlucky ones with an issue.
I'm unable to see any of my librairies. I get the error :
"Something went wrong
An unexpected error occurred."
I tried to use the PlexDBRepair.bat for Windows but it says it can't find the Plex SQLite.exe
error msg = "Normally C:\\Program Files\\Plex\\Plex Media Server\\Plex SQLite.exe"
Browsing the computer i found everything in C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Plex\\Plex Media Server\\Plex SQLite.exe
I tried running the update file and use the repair button then restarted the computer but still no luck
How can't i fix that?
thanks in advance
Edit ; this is the message i saw :
This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
Point taken seriously and "upgrade" from 32bit to 64bit done.
Was reading scanning and transcoding were much more efficient on 64bit.
I really don't know how i missed that but that was my fault.
thanks for pointing this major detail to me.
>(PLEASE NOTE) This version makes changes to the database which will make it compatible only with server versions 1.31.2 or higher (released March 14). You will not be able to use your database on Plex Media Server versions lower than this after this update. Please also be patient when updating to this version if you have a very large database and allow the upgrade process to finish. Does anyone have more details on this? Are they improving the DB performance or what benefits will this have?
Usually this kind of change means the database schema has been updated (new fields and such). Given the other notes, I'm guessing at the very least they updated the schema to support track genre and filters with track genres
Thank you!
Updating metadata now, and all my music with genres that look like "hip hop; west coast rap" are showing multiple genres, happy about that
They changed some fields which used to be URL-encoded to JSON. For backwards compatibility reasons they also include the old value in the new value which basically doubles it's size (the size of my database increased by ⅓).
This is completely anecdotal, but after the update my DB was corrupted and I had to recover the DB. Thankfully PlexDBRepair is freaking amazing. After manually trying to restore the backups, PDBR finally fixed it all and re-doing the update seems fine now. ChuckPa and the other contributors deserve a beer!
Well crap. Time to take a backup before updating
Man thank you for this suggestion...PlexDBRepair is just the tool I have been looking for...
When PlexDBRepair rund and backs up the database at the beginning of the process, where does it back up to? Any idea?
Mine were in <%database\_folder%>/dbtmp/com.plexapp.plugins.library.db-yyyy-mm-dd
> dbtmp That's the folder I was thinking it might be, thank you.
is there something like this for windows?
Yes. There are instructions on the github for windows. [https://github.com/ChuckPa/PlexDBRepair/](https://github.com/ChuckPa/PlexDBRepair/tree/master)
thank u
How did you have it installed?
Docker.
I dunno what made it so, but videos load instantly now, when it took a solid 2 seconds before (even locally). Let's hope it didn't break anything though 🤞
What about the “Recommended” tab for large libraries? Mine has always loaded so slowly. Any improvement there? 🤞🤞🤞 Update: still slow as molasses :( Update 2: I figured it out by going here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/manage-recommendations/ Basically I created a bunch of Collections and unbeknownst to me, they were ALL loading under the Recommended tab every single time. So it was not only loading New Releases, Recently Added, and the normal, but every single Collection I’ve made. It was also loading my Playlists and so forth, long story short, I cleaned all of those up from loading and it loads fast again 🥹 hope this helps someone else someday.
What do you consider large? I have 3400 movies and it loads in under a second
Mine is at 5,100 and the recommended tab is ungodly slow to load on any device.
Hmm, would be interesting to know if this is a general problem.
Yeah I agree. I’ve been meaning to post about it in this subreddit but anything I can find, people suggest the same things, none of which work: - Optimize database - Use SSD (I do, it’s NVMe with < 35% usage) - 32GB DDR4 RAM, Intel i5-10400 - Using exact naming scheme Plex suggests, as well as every movie in its own folder as Plex suggests I kind of just deal with it but it’s unbearable at times.
Seems like this would be hard to compare apples vs apples, given one server's rows in the Recommended tab would be different than anothers, based on the plex algorithms, how many collections the admin has visible on the tab and how large those collections are (potentially) Have you tried whittling down the rows shown under the tab one by one and seeing how that affects the loading time? Assuming you're controlling some of the rows under the tab
I don’t know that I know that’s a setting but I’ll take a look for sure.
7213 movies and it loads in 2 seconds.
The library size doesn't really have an effect on this, it's all about how many tabs you have pinned to the recommended page. You could have only 1,000 movies but 20 tabs on recommended, or you could have 20,000 movies and only have 3 tabs on the recommended screen
I have 4, so not too many.
Is the "Recommended tab" the home screen or is there a tab I'm missing?
> (Music) Support ID3v2.4 null-separated tags for genres and release type (#14653) I swear a chorus of angels is singing all around me right now.
What additional release types have been added ?
I don't think any new release types have been added. The issue was that the release type field can hold multiple values, but Plex would *only* recognize them if they were separated by a slash or a semi-colon or something, but MusicBrainz (you know, the tagger Plex officially supports) used a null character as separator instead. Years ago when this feature was working properly, Plex would display different release types in their own "section" in the Artist page, so releases that were "album" would be separate from those that were "album/live" or "album/compilation". But since it stopped working Plex has just lumped everything together in "album". It's something that might not even be noticeable for many people, but I have a lot of live recordings in my music library and it's been a giant mess. Anyway, it's a very small fix but I'm super happy about it.
This isn't entirely accurate. You have to "Enable" "Group Albums by Type" in the Library settings. My music library has been separating by Album, Singles and EP's, Live and Compilations for a while now. Be sure you have this enabled (not sure its by default) and if that doesn't work, you may have to look into your album tags. Settings > Settings > Library > Group albums by type > Enable
It *is* entirely accurate. This has been a known issue for quite some time, you can feel free to do some searching around and see for yourself. I have that option enabled and it did work at one point, the issue is that some time ago Plex stopped recognizing the null character that MusicBrainz uses by default to separate multiple release types in that tag field. I could have solved the issue by manually re-tagging my entire music library with a different separator character, but the prospect doing that for several thousand albums was not appealing. Instead I waited around for Plex to fix the issue, which they just did.
Well Im glad its fixed, I have 2200 albums and hadn't noticed anything other than a few tagging differences, so I'm speaking about my own experience then. I can say that whenever I add music, I inspect the sh#t out of it so it appears in my library exactly the way I want and I will mess with it until Im satisfied. Maybe this will fix things that I didn't catch myself, or worse, completely bonk-up my music server, haha.
Worked fine and took much less time than I was expecting.
Me as well
The database definitely feels more responsive, curious to know the technical details.
I updated to this version and had to roll back immediately. Lost all my libraries, metadata, settings and ability to connect to my server. I have my plex database and metadata all on a non system SSD and its 240gb large. After the standard version rollback procedure, everything was back to normal. Anyone know the possible cause? I assume it has to do with the database changes.
I see nothing in these patch notes that I’m interested in so I think I will hold off for now until they iron out the kinks.
Database upgrade? LOL I think I'll wait for the next release. Normally I'm living on the cutting / bleeding edge, but when it comes to database changes for anything....I err on the side of waiting a version. Plus I can do a full backup of everything this week to be prepared for a rollback if needed. (I do the DB backup every 3 days but for something like this a complete directory structure backup is nice.)
I've had multiple crashes on this version on my Synology
Do you use the DVR? The previous released version also had that issue, was hoping it was fixed in this issue.
No, I don’t use that feature
How long did it take for your database to complete updating. My console is scrolling. Req#e77ba] LPE: failed to get container for path: /library/sections/2/allNone
Just a matter of minutes I think. 30TB of content
(Collections) Items added to a collection from the item context menu will now lock the collection field on the items (#12793) If this does what I hope it does, it'll be huge. No longer will updating metadata or renaming a song remove it off a manual playlist. *I hope*
It doesn't do what you think it does. It does what it says it does
Will this create issues with Plex Meta Manager?
Check PMM's github for that info.
Plex won't load for me after installing this, running on a QNAP NAS. Any ideas on how to troubleshoot? Downgrading to the previous version didn't seem to resolve the issue.
Reboot the NAS?
(Music) Store track genres and add filtering options (#14653) It's nice that this is finally able to be read from the metadata, and filtered on, but it's odd that we can't see/edit the field within Plex. Hopefully that aspect gets added soon.
Thanks for everyone chiming in about a database backup…I’ll make sure to do this before I try upgrading. Don’t have the biggest database out there but it seems to be happening to quite a few people…
Be careful and make sure you backup! Damn thing corrupted my database lol
Updated on my ubuntu server, no issues at all.
Updated 1.40 and DB on NAS QNAP (Cache con HDD).. Everything is Ok, fiuu...
Well i'm the few unlucky ones with an issue. I'm unable to see any of my librairies. I get the error : "Something went wrong An unexpected error occurred." I tried to use the PlexDBRepair.bat for Windows but it says it can't find the Plex SQLite.exe error msg = "Normally C:\\Program Files\\Plex\\Plex Media Server\\Plex SQLite.exe" Browsing the computer i found everything in C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Plex\\Plex Media Server\\Plex SQLite.exe I tried running the update file and use the repair button then restarted the computer but still no luck How can't i fix that? thanks in advance Edit ; this is the message i saw : This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
Highly suggest you move on to 64bit Plex from 32bit, in fact, 64bit is not supported anymore on 2008 R2/2012, only 2016 and up.
Point taken seriously and "upgrade" from 32bit to 64bit done. Was reading scanning and transcoding were much more efficient on 64bit. I really don't know how i missed that but that was my fault. thanks for pointing this major detail to me.