Server Version#: Linux 1.21.1.3876
Linux OS: Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS
Synology NFS Mount for Media
I was symlinking some movies over into the specials of my TV library and noticed some interesting behavior.
Specifically, I symlinked ‘Voltron: Fleet of Doom’ from my movies into my TV shows. It is a crossover between, and so appears in both ‘Voltron: Defenders of the Universe’ and ‘Vehicle Fleet Voltron’.
After a rescan it was only appearing however inside ‘Defenders’. I played around with it for a while and when I deleted the symlink in ‘Defenders’ THEN it recognized the one in ‘Vehicle’. Specifically, it appeared to think it had moved as it updated the show in the historical order it was in further back in recently added rather than moving it to the front of the list or giving me a trash indication. Leaving the ‘Vehicle’ symlink in place and creating a brand new symlink for ‘Defenders’ again it then would swap back on rescan.
It appears that the lowest alphabetical show for the symlinked file, even though it is symlinked in both shows with their respective appropriate names, will only show on the later scanned show treating it as if it had been moved?
Could you please expand upon why it would be especially bad ‘crossing the types’.
The ‘Movies’ and ‘TV Shows’ are setup as separate libraries and folders, each one specific to the type as per guidelines. The TV shows will often list a movie in their ‘Season 0’ and rather than having multiple copies of the media (which even if it was done that way should also have fingerprint issues I would assume? My testing showed it did not have issues and showed both entries) I started trying symlinking today to bring the movie file (example: ‘Voltron - Fleet of Doom (1986) {imdb-tt0472496} - 480p.mkv’) in with an appropriately named symlink for TV show matching (example: ‘Voltron Defender of the Universe S00E01 - Fleet of Doom.mkv’).
Minus the fact this one movie is a crossover and so listed in multiple shows, each library would normally only see the file once. If the libraries are seperate, I do not see necessarily why a symlink would cause issues across libraries. Also as I mentioned above, having separate copies of the movie file itself rather than symlinks behaved differently even though they should have the same ‘fingerprint’.
Correct, it is organized into a single share on Synology that is then NFS mounted to the linux system running Plex.
On the Synology structure is esentially:
PlexMedia/
Movies/
Voltron - Fleet of Doom (1986) {imdb-tt0472496}/
Voltron - Fleet of Doom (1986) {imdb-tt0472496} - 480p.mkv
TV/
Vehicle Force Voltron/
Specials/
Vehicle Force Voltron S00E01 - Fleet of Doom.mkv
Voltron Defender of the Universe/
Specials/
Voltron Defender of the Universe S00E01 - Fleet of Doom.mkv
This particular example is poor of what I am trying to accomplish as you stated, it doesn’t really fit into either which is a fault of this oddball piece of media.
Better examples of the movie-as-a-special situation I am looking to work with is say the anime Inuyasha’s season 0 on TheTVDB. They would release movies that fit between seasons that are canon and should be watched in order, but are movies and can be matched as movies. I have them physically in Movies as that allow extra features, but it would be nice to easily reference and play it from the TV series (leveraging the ‘On Deck’ feature). From then a point of standardization I would want to do this with every TV series that lists a movie in its specials
I have up until now used collections so I can see movies from the TV show and vice-versa, but the advantage of having it in the Season 0 directly is it can specify exactly which ones to relate without needing specific collections to leverage this. An example is I have a large collection of ‘Batman’ media and I would prefer not to have several collections to tie specific movies to specific TV series and instead just have an entire ‘Batman’ collection, or possibly break it down to animated vs live action collections. If I start breaking it down to ‘Batman the Animated Series’ collection and a seperate ‘Batman Beyond’ collection just to highlight their specific movies, over time the number and complexity of collections could become ridiculous which I want to avoid.
So the media being in Movies is where I want it and it belongs from my standardization point. Is a hardlink ‘bad’ enough to cause behavior issues with Plex that I should avoid doing this and stick with collections (‘Batman the Animated Series’ and ‘The New Batman Adventures’ both reference some of the same films like the two Voltron series) or would hardlinks be safe enough to utilize since I am doing a direct movie file?
I’m not fond of hard linking or symbolic linking anything when we’re dealing with media.
I’m honestly even less fond of it across the network.
Knowing NFS doesn’t handle symlinks well; Most NFS servers show the link contents instead of resolving to the symlink target, I think hard links on the NFS server side is going to be the only way to make this work.
The original file will be where it is and free standing.
The hard linked ‘copy’ (just another inode entry for the same file in another directory) will appear to be free standing as well.
I don’t work very often with Anime media. Everything I’ve seen has always been such that it’s difficult. It’s not really a television series or movie in the traditional sense and therefore it’s the square peg in one of two round holes.
Thanks for the feedback. I will convert the symlinks over to hardlinks then for now and play it by ear. This was my first attempt at starting to deal with linking the media and knowing symlinks can be used for folders or files deffered to them.
