Server Version#: 1.32.6.7557
Player Version#: 4.108.0
Running on MX Linux.
The Plex website states that
If no content at all is being found or you’re unable to see particular directories when trying to set up a library, you may be encountering permission issues (which prevent Plex from being allowed to see/access the content). The user account under which your Plex Media Server is running needs to have “permission” to access your content.
For Windows or OS X installs, this will almost always be the user account logged into the computer. For NAS- or Linux-based Plex Media Server installs, it will usually be the plex:plex user in a default install.
If using a network share, you need to ensure that the share is under a user that has appropriate access permissions.
The user account needs to have at least read and execute permission for the directories and content.
Tip!: You’ll want to make sure that not only the folder that contains the files but also the files themselves have the correct permissions. That includes new files you copy into the content location.
How do I make Plex see my media directories? At present they are at /home/my-name/Documents/Videos/, but I cannot navigate to this directory when trying to create a Library.
Plex is running under its own user account. As such, itr does by default not have access to the data of your persoinal user account.
Don’t store your media files inside your personal “user data” (or “home”) folder. Some distributions mess with the access permissions in such a way that you’ll never succeed with granting access for Plex.
Thank you for your reply. It’s very frustrating! According to your explanation Plex doesn’t have access to my personal user account, but apparently it’s the same the other way round. I cannot have access to Plex in a way that I could create a folder for my media files!
When I try to add a Library I get a dialog pointing to a Plex (home), a /, mqueue, hugepages and a couple of my external drives (formatted as NTFS because I also have Windows on my PC).
I don’t see anywhere that I could create a media folder that I would also be able to access from my user account.
EDIT: To say that it was easier to set up Plex in Windows!
Of course you can. You are the administrator of the machine (or at least you can be, if you choose to. Look up the sudo command.).
You can create folders and assign access permissions to them. Just not inside the pre-created folders which are prepared for you by your Linux distribution. These can be special.
Using Linux was your choice. You need to learn its basics, or you will only experience frustration.
