I wish there was a basic “how to” on setting up volumes and folders on a QNAP device so that Plex can locate movies. I’ve read Q14 in the FAQ, along with the “QNAP Turbo NAS SW User Guide”, but that seems to be slightly out of date (for example, it states that you can specify a folder as “media” when you create it, but that doesn’t seem to be an option.) This whole thing is further confused by the message that pops up about “Shared folders can also be configured as content source folders… go to Control Panel -> Multimedia Console -> Content Management.”
I have tried to set up a folder (several different ways) under my primary volume but can’t seem to get Plex to locate the single movie folder that I’ve placed in there.
I’m sorry because I’m sure this has been discussed to death here but I’ve been trying different ways to make this work for 2 days now and can’t seem to get anywhere. Like I started off saying, I guess I’m looking for a very basic set of instructions on how to set up a directory so that Plex can find my movies. I’m brand new to QNAP and Plex, so please be kind.
I’m making a bit of progress here but have two related questions:
Plex apparently wasn’t able to find the movie I had placed into my /media/movies folder. It was a rather long path (/media/movies/2 Guns/MainMovie/2_GUNS_NA/BDMV/STREAM/00023.m2ts). Once I moved the single *.m2ts file directly into the /media/movies/2 Guns folder, Plex found it correctly. Question: Why won’t Plex navigate through the tree and find this file?
I also have many DVD movies in the video_ts format. I understand that Plex doesn’t support this, so I converted the DVD files (using Handbrake) over to an MKV file and placed that in the /media/movies/101 Dalmations folder. Plex found this movie but incorrectly recognized it as the movie “Share”.
From above, I’ve learned that rather than being able to do a mass copy of all my movies, I need to manually do them one at a time, renaming and restructuring the folders in order to comply with Plex’s naming conventions. It’s tedious, but I guess I can live with it.
What’s making this more complex is how slowly the movie copies are going – generally 3+ hours for a ~30GB movie. I’m only getting about 3MB/s of transfer speed. I have the QNAP and the source (Unraid on a PC) both plugged into a Cisco switch, which is connected at 1000 Mbps.
Thank you, Dane! I’ll definitely check out filebot. Could make life a lot easier.
And I solved the file copy speed issue. By mounting both NAS boxes from my main server (which is also directly on the Cisco switch), I’m now copying 30GB movies over in about 13 minutes at just over 400 Mbps, a 15X+ improvement! : )
Brilliant, thank you, Chuck!! Extremely helpful. I was able to get 3 movies renamed and moved into the correct directory structure using your instructions.
However, I’m finding that filebot doesn’t seem to be able to determine the content of a movie simply by the movie file itself. In my situation, I have many movies all named the same thing (e.g. “00000.m2ts”), an artifact of the ripping software I use. Once I copy, say, 3 of those over onto my QNAP NAS, I now have a folder ("…/media/movies/temp") with 3 files in it, e.g.
00000.m2ts
00000(2).m2ts
00000(3).m2ts
At this point, any information about what the movie is from the original directory structure has been lost. Any way to get around this problem?
Okay, got it. Doing a manual rename is what I was trying to avoid (hoping for a miracle whereby filebot could ID the movie only by the content, sort of like how Shazam can pick up a song), but it sounds like in my situation there’s no avoiding it.
You’re correct, however – a rough rename of the movie is certainly better than having to build the whole directory structure from scratch.
Now that I am able to get some movies onto this new NAS box, my next challenge is figuring out how to get Plex to play movies out of the built-in HDMI port. I’ve watched videos about how to enable that port (using HD Station) and can see that app’s menu via the HDMI output, but Plex isn’t one of the options. And in Plex, the only output options listed are “Cast…” and “Sonos…”
My original goal with this NAS box was to make copies of my movies and then use this box as a media server at a 2nd home. This QNAP’s HDMI port would feed directly into an AV receiver which then feeds a TV screen. I was hoping to use my phone to select a movie and then play it using Plex.
Is this use case reasonable? I’m not sure why it’s not more intuitive, which makes me think that this isn’t how Plex is supposed to work. Again, complete newb when it comes to both QNAP and Plex.
