Plex not picking up media when on external 1TB drive (Raspberry Pi 3B+)

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
1

Hi everyone.

I’m having trouble setting up a Plex Server on my RPi 3B+.

The media server picks up the folders/movies when adding the library folders but when I scan the library folders for new content nothing appears in my library.

I have followed this tutorial: Using EXT, NTFS, or other format drives (internal or external) on Linux

But I get the same results.

I have also tried:

  • Giving the external drive 777 permissions
  • Changing the drives owner to plex (changed it back to pi once it didn’t work)
  • Restarted the Pi after permissions and change owner commands were run
  • Tried a different port on Pi for external drive

I can’t seem to find a way around this and it’s starting to get a little frustrating.

Any other ideas on what could be the issue?

Thanks

2

See if user ‘plex’ has read permissions to the directory where your media is mounted. For example, my media is stored on an SMB share which I have mounted at /mnt/cifs. So, to see if ‘plex’ can read it:
sudo -u plex ls -l /mnt/cifs

Replace /mnt/cifs with your mount point. Also run the command on the sub-directories within. So my movies are stored in “Movies” on that share:
sudo -u plex ls -l /mnt/cifs/Movies

If ‘pi’ owns the media files, make sure that ‘plex’ is a member of the ‘pi’ group. Run:
groups plex
The output will be the list of groups of which ‘plex’ is a member. Make sure ‘pi’ is listed.

If all that checks out (‘plex’ can read the files/directories of the media and is a member of ‘pi’) you may want to check your library configuration. Plex is picky about library types. So, TV content should not be stored in a “Movies” library, and vice versa.

1 Like
3

I managed to fix it by changing the scanner from Plex Movies to Plex Video Files, it then found everything on my drive.

4

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