Server Version#: 1.41.8.9834
Player Version#: 4.147.1
I am still new in the linux/plex business so this issue might be obvious for you, but defently not for me.
Since 1-2 days older movies are having playback issues, meaning they dont play at all. Sometimes they wont stop loading, sometimes louding crashes with the error message Transcoder failed. The transcoder exited due to an error.
Ive tried library scans, metadata refresh, analyse, optimize database.
Even moving movies of the mounted plexmovie folder - deleting the plex metadata - moving them back into the folder and rescaning them; didnt help either, no it made it worse.
I think the logs wont show much because i had them disabled before the problems began, but i made sure to start playback with at least 1 movie i knew didnt work.
Your logs don’t show much since you don’t have debugging logging enable. I do see 1 error that said permission error. I’m not a Linux person so can’t help, but that should point you where to look.
I tried some more movies, some worked some didn’t. I’ll upload the logs when im home. But simply from the movie format cant find any patterns in terms of mkv, avi, mp4 or HDR, DV, 4k 1080p, 720p.
Im thankful for any help i can get. There are a lot of good movies that stopped working for seemingly no reason at all.
I’ll check the permissions for the mounted movie folder, but i dont think thats the problem because if plex didnt have permission to access the folder, why should it be able to access something at all.
Ok i can already say, permissions where defenetly the problem. In the container setup the mounted media folder only had read only permissions for whatever reason. Ive changed it to rw but the problem persists. Some movies still dont play at all and some are still broken even after i restarted and did a new library scan and metadata refresh…
Found the problem with the help of ChatGPT. AI is a BIGTIME help when it comes to opensource software like Linux or Plex.
Problem Summary (Plex not detecting or playing movie files):
Plex wasn’t recognizing or playing a specific movie file (Moviename (year of realese).avi), even after renaming and placing it in the proper folder structure (/volume1/media/Filme/Moviename (year of realese)/Moviename (year of realese).avi). FFmpeg also initially failed with a “permission denied” error.
Diagnosis Process:
File structure and naming were correct, so metadata scraping wasn’t the issue.
Ran this to check folder and file permissions:
bash
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ls -ld "/volume1/media/Filme/Moviename (year of realese)"
ls -l "/volume1/media/Filme/Moviename (year of realese))/Moviename (year of realese).avi"
Output showed:
Folder: drwx------ — only accessible by the file owner.
File: -r-x------ — readable only by the owner.
Plex runs as user ID 999, not the file owner (User), and therefore had no access.
Confirmed Plex was running under user 999 using:
bash
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ps aux | grep plex
FFmpeg testing also failed with Permission denied until ownership and permissions were corrected.
Solution:
Fixed permissions so Plex could access the media:
bash
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sudo chmod 755 "/volume1/media/Filme/Moviename (year of realese)"
sudo chmod 644 "/volume1/media/Filme/Moviename (year of realese)/Moviename (year of realese).avi"
Then applied a recursive fix to the entire media library:
bash
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sudo find /volume1/media -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
sudo find /volume1/media -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
After that:
Plex was able to see and scan the movie.
Playback worked perfectly.
Takeaway:
If Plex can’t see or play your files, don’t forget to check permissions — especially if your media lives on a NAS or external mount. Plex needs at least read + execute access to folders and read access to files.
So yeah after all it was all permissionproblems which seemingly came out of nowhere, i dont know why and ChatGPT didn’t know either, but the problem is fixed and all is good now
Problem Summary (Plex not detecting or playing movie files):
Diagnosis Process:
Solution:
Takeaway: