Media library is consistently empty

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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1

I’m at my wit’s end here. No matter what I do, no content shows up in my library.

I’ve tried adding subfolders to see if it was a directory issue. I’ve tried changing permissions, changing group ownership, rebooting, changing the starting user, purging and reinstalling Plex (including deleting its stuff in /opt), everything I can think of. I still can’t get any content to show up.

I’ve never had any of these issues on the prior systems I used plex on.

Does Plex not like ZFS or something? That’s the only thing I can think of that I haven’t tried at this point, because there are no filesystems on there that are not ZFS, and I’ve never tried it on ZFS before.

I’m on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, with the latest Plex server installation.

2

Can you give a specific example of how your media is organized in your file system and how you configured that library of yours (e.g. what library type are we talking about and what folder is that library linked to)?

3

The way I have it set up is

  • /home/me
    • Photography
    • Multimedia
      • Movies
      • Television
      • Music

I’ve tried making a library of TV shows on the Television one. I’ve also tried doing it on subfolders in that to see if it would work that way. Everything listed below my home directory is also owned by the plex group, and all users have read access to the listed folders. I also tried making a movies library and a photos library. None of them ever appear to see any items, even if I browse in the webapp by folder, but the items are clearly there if I go to my server or its Samba share.

4

I also tried following the advice in this thread with no success: No content in library

5

Different distros play games with the home directory.

I suggest an alternative.

  1. Make /home/media (or similar name)
  2. Make it owned by you (chown)
  3. Put your media there
  4. find /home/media -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
  5. find /home/media -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;

Now you own the files (you must maintain that),
Plex can read everything there.

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