Plex will not find videos within the folder that I associate with a library

[martinund]

Server Version#: Version 1.41.1.9057
Player Version#: Version 1.41.1.9057
<If providing server logs please do NOT turn on verbose logging, only debug logging should be enabled>

I have installed and configured Plex server on a Windows 7 PC and everything works perfectly. I’m only interested in sharing video files that I have recorded off-air: all the online libraries/facilities are not important to me.

I’m now trying to migrate the Plex library to a Raspberry Pi 5 running Raspberry Pi OS.

uname -a gives
Linux pi5 6.6.47+rpt-rpi-2712 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.6.47-1+rpt1 (2024-09-02) aarch64 GNU/Linux

I have installed Plex server from plexmediaserver_1.41.0.8994-f2c27da23_armhf.deb

In the initial setup wizard, I have given the server a name “Pi5” and logged in with the same user ID and password as for the Windows PC.

My video files (a small subset of the full set, for testing) are on an external USB drive formatted as NTFS. This auto-mounted as /media/pi/Transcend1 as soon as I plugged it in and I can see its contents, either using the Pi File Manager or using “ls -l”. I have done a recursive “chmod 777” on all the folders/files on that drive, to eliminate any permission problems.

I “Add Library” of type TV Shows and then Browse for Media Folder. In the Add Folder dialogue, I select “/media/pi/Transcend1”.

But when I scan for files, nothing is detected.

I notice that in the Add Folder dialogue, I cannot navigate to subfolders on the HDD, which makes me wonder whether Plex does not have permission to access the contents of the drive, despite the recursive “chmod 777”.

The contents of the HDD contain files/folders (in a tree) such as

/test/drama/His Dark Materials/Season 3/His Dark Materials - s01e01.ts

What really stupid mistake am I making?

[ChuckPa]

This is normal Linux-Gnome behavior when the automounter is mounting USB or NTFS drives under /media/<username>. Nothing will be visible to user plex.

Your options are:

1. Change the username Plex runs as
2. Change the mount point (make an entry in /etc/fstab)

To change the username Plex runs as, see here -

Linux Tips

Customizing your Plex configuration on systemd based systems This information is intended for those systems where cat /proc/1/comm returns systemd. On systems which use Systemd (Ubuntu 16+, Fedora 26+, Centos 7+, Debian 8+,) you create this customization file which SystemD reads prior to launching PMS. This file is independent of the default configuration and service control mechanisms in /lib/systemd/system/plexmediaserver.service. Your customization override is preserved across updates, un…

To gain control of the USB / NTFS drives and how they mount, see here -

Linux Tips

Using other hard drives (Windows or Linux) with PMS This How-To is written to help with Internal and External drives. It also is written to demonstrate how to cope with NTFS and EXT4 formatted drives. By logical extension, any format supported by Linux can be handled using the technique shown here. In all cases, the goal is to give user plex permission to read your media files which Linux doesn’t allow by default due to its strict security model. We will walk through the steps needed …

[martinund]

Thanks. That was indeed the cause of my problem. Intriguingly, it also wouldn’t work if I mounted it to a chmod 777 directory below /home/pi. But it’s fine if I mount to a directory below /mnt.

I then hit another problem that the Plex client on a Roku wouldn’t play from Plex on the Pi whereas it would on the Windows Pi. But that turned out to be a duff video file (plays fine on VLC but not on Plex/Roku which gives up after encoutering playback errors). Sod’s law that I tried the next unwatched episode in the series and by sheer bad luck I chose a bad file. I’m just re-encoding that from H264 to MPEG2 using VideoReDo - and that will probably take an hour or so

Thanks for your help. I would never have guessed that the location of the mount point was significant, given that even the default /media/pi location is readable by a non-pi user and that the permissions are 777. Something to remember for the future

[ChuckPa]

There are certain distros which have weird rules.

Fundamentally:

1. /media is pretty much controlled by Nautilus – unless you do a manual mount using /etc/fstab

2. Putting anything in your home directory breaks all the rules. At most, create a mount point directory in /home (e.g. /home/plex) which YOU own but Plex can read. This works out nicely for a lot of special cases as well.