Plex will automatically ignore and exclude certain content:

• Files that include the word sample in the filename and are less than 300MB in size
• Trailers, extras, and bonus material:
  • Files or folders Local Media Assets - Movies (trailers, featurettes, behind the scenes, etc.)
  • Sub-folders that include the words extras, samples, bonus, or bonus disc
• Disk image content:
  • Files that have the suffix .dvdmedia, .iso, or .img (and other disk image formats)
  • Sub-folders for disk image formats (VIDEO_TS, BDMV, etc.)

Currently these filters are hard coded into the file scanner logic and these items are excluded before metadata matching begins.

Only a very few select number of videos are affected by this issue and often have simple workarounds. Usually, simply renaming the file or directory to not include one of the above keywords is enough to have Plex start recognizing and handling the file.

Related Page: Local Media Assets – Movies
Related Page: Why are ISO, VIDEO_TS, and other Disk Image Formats Not Supported?

Excluding New Content with .plexignore

Warning: This is an advanced feature and is not intended for general users.

When scanning in new content for your libraries, you can tell the scanner to ignore files or patterns by adding a .plexignore file to any folder in your library’s content location. “.plexignore” is the exact name of the file to use; nothing more and nothing less (e.g. it starts with a period and does not have a separate “file extension”).

If you add the “.plexignore” file to the root (top-level) folder in the content location, the ignore rules will apply to all sub-folders.

Note: Many text editors (e.g. Notepad and Text Edit) will save files with a .txt extension by default. In such a case, you’ll need to manually rename the file to .plexignore exactly by removing the extension. (If you leave it as “plexignore.txt” or “.plexignore.txt” it will not work.)

Add one pattern per line for things you’d like to ignore. The file is interpreted as follows:

• Blank lines are ignored.
• Lines starting with # are comments.
• The * character is a wildcard.
• Patterns without the forward-slash (/) character (e.g. *.mkv) match filenames in the same directory as the .plexignore file, or anywhere in the tree if .plexignore is a root of the section.
• Patterns with the forward-slash (/) character (e.g. somedir/*) match directory and file patterns relative to the directory containing the .plexignore file.

Tip!: Always use forward-slashes (/) as path delimiters, even on Windows.

Example contents of a .plexignore file:

# Ignore all files with "trailer" in the name
*trailer*

# Ignore files with the extension ".cr2"
*.cr2

# Ignore directories called "Modified"
*Modified/*

# Ignore all ".tif" files in the "thumbnails" subdirectory
*thumbnails/*.tif