I’m building my mom a Plex Media Server as a Christmas gift and I’ve been configuring it for about a week. It’s on a Zimaboard 832 running a Docker install from a 4TB NVMe in its PCIe slot. It’s working well but there’s an issue that I cannot figure out the cause or solution to.
I set up a joint cloud account that her server and my Synology NAS are connected to so that I can share files with her by zipping and dropping them into a folder. I wrote a script to monitor that folder, unzip and distribute them accordingly by Library when new files are noticed. That part is working flawlessly.
BUT when they get moved into the Plex Media library folders, Plex never sees them. Movie, Photo or Music - same thing. But if I download the unzipped folder and then manually drag it back to the same place, they are instantly recognized.
So this tells me that the files themselves are not corrupted or stripped of any metadata since the identical files are recognized just fine when done by hand. The reason I zip them is this same issue, I initially thought perhaps metadata was being affected at some point along the way and that zipping might prevent it but it really doesn’t seem to make a difference one way or the other.
Can anybody please shed some light? I’m much more interested in getting it working properly than in determining the reason (although one usually begets the other). But I need to get it into a box and wrapped before I head over for the weekend tomorrow night. So I’m kind of pressured and desperate at this point. Please any suggestions are welcome! Thank you!
Your configuration is way out of my experience, so I won’t be much help beyond this question:
What’s the OS on the Zimaboard? If Linux, is it possible there’s a file permissions problem? Do they get different permissions if unzipped via script vs. manually moved?
The other thing to look at is unzip to a temp directory, and then move it to the correct location, sometimes plex tries to index a partial file, fails, and then ignores the file moving forward.
755 should be more than enough. Try using a temp folder to unzip. If plex is watching the directory, it may be scanning the file prior to it being completely unzipped, and thus plex ignores the file.
Ok wait so now this is weird. The files that I brought in to test permissions for, I hadn’t actually looked at Plex until just now and they all showed up. So what? The solution is for me to post an earnest need for assistance so that it can make a fool and a liar out of me? I don’t get it – I did nothing different this time than I’ve been the last few days.
Hahaha. I just tried something else – writing a local script on my Mac to monitor a cloud folder and having it copy the files over and that worked beautifully. It’s not ideal but until I can figure out what’s going on at least it works and I can install that on her Mac. Thank you both for all your help. If you do get inspired with anything else I can look at or try, please by all means let me know! Have a great holiday guys!
