MKV Files Not Playing

[Huecuva]

So I believe this does appear to be an issue with my Series library and not specifically MKV files. I first even discovered this issue by deleting a series through Jellyfin and Jellyfin still had it listed. I believed it was a problem with MKVs because I redownloaded the series in better quality and tried to play it but I did not realize that Jellyfin was still listing the old version I had and would not play it because it no longer existed. It will not list the new version that I redownloaded. Jellyfin will also not update any metadata for anything in the Series folder.

[sly625]

I'm still inclined to believe that this could be an issue with how Jellyfin is scanning metadata. Just to be sure, try disabling ALL metadata downloaders and scan your library again. If your media appears in the library (albeit without any automatically scanned and applied metadata), then Jellyfin is getting hung up with the metadata providers somehow. If they still don't appear...I'm not sure. But that would at least rule out the issues that I've been having with my own server. If that works, you can try to add in the metadata downloaders one at a time and play with settings like the priority order, change some of the existing media in the library, and scan to test which configurations work and which do not.

I'll note that I just added a movie to my movie library and was having trouble getting it to show up. The count of movies (x out of y) was indicating that it existed and Jellyfin was successfully adding the image data, but it wouldn't appear until I disabled TheTVDB metadata downloader for that library and scanned again. So at least for me, my culprit is usually the configuration of the metadata downloaders.

[Huecuva]

I had thought I unchecked every instance of all metadata sources, so I kept getting hopeful when I would double check and keep discovering more to uncheck. However, I've finally unchecked all of them for sure and rescanning the library still does not pick up the new series.

[sly625]

Did you get a chance to confirm the permissions for your directory that houses your media? I saw that permissions were mentioned earlier in the thread, and that is another possible explanation for why Jellyfin might not be able to apply metadata and show the media in your library.

Another troubleshooting option I can think of would be to create a new directory, add the new directory as a Shows library in Jellyfin, and then put a couple of shows in that new directory. Then you can try scanning for the shows. You might start with disabling all metadata providers and choosing the nuclear "replace all metadata" on the new library to ensure that all metadata files are replaced. Again, the shows would not pull any metadata if all the metadata providers are disabled, but it should still identify the shows and allow you to select and play them.

If Jellyfin doesn't find your shows after all that, I would suspect that missing permissions are blocking Jellyfin from properly seeing the files.

[Huecuva]

I haven't yet managed to check the permissions of the Series directory, but to be honest I really doubt that's the problem. The TV directory is inside my Media directory right alongside the Movies directory, which is not having a problem. None of the other library directories are having a problem at all. Just the one. I will check it, but it's not really high priority.

I will try creating another directory for series and copy a couple over to see what happens with that when I get a chance later.

EDIT: So I just checked the permissions on my TV directory just to get it out of the way and as I thought, they're still exactly the same as the permissions on every other one of my library directories which aren't having media scanning problems.

Code:

/Media$ ls -la
total 370
drwxrwxr--  10 <user>    <user>  11 Jun 29  2025  .
drwxrwxr--  55 <user>    <user> 110 Dec 20 02:34  ..
drwxrwx---  3 torrent <user>  3 May 29  2022 'Apps and Software'
drwxrwxr--  30 <user>    <user>  33 Sep 30 00:25  Biopics
drwxrwx---  14 torrent mike  14 Aug 23 16:41  Books
-rwxrwxr--  1 <user>    <user> 115 Jun  7  2017  desktop.ini
drwxrwxr--  17 <user>    <user>  21 Aug 17 02:56  Documentaries
drwxrwxr-- 477 <user>    <user> 549 Dec 30 23:41  Movies
drwxrwxr--  25 <user>    <user>  27 Sep 19 05:47  Music
drwxrwxr--  3 <user>    <user>  3 Dec 31 20:01 'Stand Up'
drwxrwxr-- 189 <user>    <user> 193 Dec 31 19:17  TV

Honestly I'm not really sure why those two are owned by "torrent" user, as that's the user for my qbittorrent, but neither of those directories are used by Jellyfin at all. Jellyfin runs under its own jellyfin user but that user is added to the same group as my main user, which I've replaced there with <user> and again, it's not having permission issues with the Movies, Documentaries, Biopics or Stand Up directories.

[sly625]

To be thorough, you may also check the permissions of the files contained in your TV directory too. I noticed that your output doesn't indicate the presence of a special permission bit (rws instead of rwx). For my server, I made sure to add a special permission bit to the group (my server is set up to have users given the jellyfin group) with "chmod g+s". I also applied an ACL (setfacl -m g:GROUPNAME:rwx /path/to/dir, visible with a "+" after all the listed rwx permissions) to make super extra sure that my jellyfin group permission would be applied all the way down. Your permissions don't have either of these safeguards from what I see, so I think that there could be scenarios that could cause your files contained in the TV directory to have different permissions than what you're seeing applied to the directory itself. For example, I'm a simple guy and just cut/paste the files from my Windows computer to my relevant server directory via a Samba share. This would apply <user>:<user> if neither of my permission configurations were in place. This could still work for your implementation since your server implementation puts jellyfin as part of your user group, but mine would have permission problems.

To summarize, it's possible that your file permissions are fine in /Media/TV if you're adding the files using a process that is owned by your <user> account, but if it is getting added by a different system process (torrent for example), the files might get something like torrent:torrent for their owner and group permissions, which would be a problem if your jellyfin account isn't a part of the torrent group. You should still verify that all the contained directories/files show <user>:<user> when checked. If they do, then likely not a permissions issue.

[Goliath]

I encountered a similar problem. I found a solution by adding the series folder to the new "mixed movies and shows" media library. As a result, the series folder was updated on its own, and .mkv files appeared.

What country do you live in?

[sly625]

Documentation for the Mixed Movies and Shows library indicates that this library type is actually deprecated: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server...-and-shows

I have also experimented with that library type though when I was having issues and it does seem to scan the library differently, resulting in it returning shows that stubbornly wouldn't appear in my Shows library. For me, the fix was to modify the metadata providers being used on the Shows library. I'd also messed with mapping my Shows directory to the Home Videos and Photos library, which scans differently due to treating the media as not having metadata providers. Once shows started showing up there, they also started showing up in my Shows library. However, this would undo itself when I removed that library, meaning that I would have had to keep both the Shows and the Mixed Movies and Shows libraries if I wanted to use the Shows library.

I'll note that the documentation doesn't explicitly advise against mapping the same directory to multiple libraries, but it doesn't seem like a good long-term solution to me. The fact that it works can give information on how Jellyfin is scanning the libraries and inform on where the problem is, but I wouldn't stop at that. It's possible that future implementations of Jellyfin might not play well with mapping multiple libraries to the same path, or they could eventually remove that library type entirely with future versions. For you Goliath, you might be seeing the same issue I was, and the solution then would be to remove problematic metadata provider settings.

[Galin McMahon]

When I first started using JF, I also had a LOT of issues of media not appearing. I fixed this 100% by using the prescribed naming nomenclature on every source file, i.e. Show Name (2026) [tmdbid-2026]. This is on the actual media folders and files, not tweaking the metadate inside JF. This may or may not relate to or help your specific issue but I thought I'd point it out as I spent a lot of time on this issue and now it's a non issue.

[Huecuva]

I created a test directory and copied the TV show that stubbornly refused to show up in my Series library. I set it as type mixed shows and movies and disabled ALL metatadata sources and the contents showed up just fine in Jellyfin. There's clearly some kind of bug in the way Jellyfin scans series in the Shows library type. I had no issues with it up until recently. I have a feeling it has something to do with the new database type they've migrated to with 10.11.X.

EDIT: I just went back and enabled all the metadata sources on my test directory and it didn't seem to have a problem fetching that either. The problem is with the way Jellyfin scans the Shows library type. It has to be.

EDIT AGAIN: On closer examination, maybe it's not fetching metatadata. It's extracted screen caps from the episodes, but it hasn't gotten the episode titles or the series poster or actor information or anything like that. (EDIT YET AGAIN) It appears that that's because it doesn't have any of the metadata source ID tags. Oops.