Yes. It means that the user under which Plex Media Server is running (usually plex) doesn’t have permission to access that path.
Yes and no. If you were in some other path those permissions (777) would would likely work. However, /media/<user> is special. In Ubuntu in particular (and other distros too) paths under /media/ are used by the system to mount removable volumes. In doing so, ACLs (Access Control Lists) are applied. ACLs are a different form of access control which supercede standard Unix-style permissions. If you ls -al /media, you’ll see a ‘+’ at the end of the permissions list of the user folders. Those indicate ACLs are being used.
There are ways to adjust the ACLs to allow other users to access the path(s) in question (see the man page for setfacl). However, it’s generally better to create static mounts. There’s some guidance here regarding how to setup static mounts for disks for use with Plex:
Yes, a few things:
- TV series folders should be the actual name of the show with the year of the first episode’s release in parentheses appended, e.g. “Babylon 5 (1993)”
- While not strictly necessary (but generally considered best practice), the filenames for the episodes should be in the form “Show Name (release year) - SxxEyy - Episode Title.ext.” Though a bare minimum is “SxxEyy.ext” for an episode to be recognized correctly, assuming its containing folder is named correctly.
- A season folder should be included; the episodes will live in their appropriate season. So a full path from the show’s folder down would be “Babylon 5 (1993)/Season 01/Babylon 5 (1993) - S01E01 - Midnight on the Firing Line.mp4”.
- For movies, it’s considered best practice to include the release year in parentheses after the movie name (in both the folder name and file name: …/1941 (1979)/1941 (1971).mp4
The full naming and organization guidelines can be found in the appropriate sections here:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/#cat-your-media
