How to give Plex access to my media files?

TrueNAS General
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My media is stored in /mnt/pool_home/media and I have installed the Plex app.

Inside of the app I could neither find an option to set a local path containing my media, nor could I find an option to set a network path.
The closest thing I could find was this Add your media to Plex-screen when clicking Your Media in the sidebar:

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But that page appears to be useless. Clicking the Get Plex Media Server button just redirects me to the official Plex website which is not helping.

Looking at the app settings on the TrueNAS side, I also couldn’t find an option to set the media storage location:

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I then tried adding additional storage:
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But it’s not helping because I can’t find a way to inform Plex of that location.

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Permissions issue? if Plex is running on the apps user (568), does “apps” have permission to access your media folders? This topic pops up a lot, so you might want to use the search feature to look at past threads.

This video may help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GpaxFYe3MU&list=LL&index=116&t=331s

It’s how I got Plex/Jellyfin up and running when I first built my NAS.

3

The “Additional Storage” host path looks good (though personally I would have mounted it in the container as /media rather than /nas/media).

In Plex, go to the server and Add library, and then Add folder and you should be able to select /nas/media/films as a film library etc. If you can’t see anything inside /nas/media then you have a permissions error.

1 Like
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/media is often reserved for removable media devices on Linux, that’s why I figured it would be safer to mount it in /nas/media.

In the meantime I managed to fix the issue. The Plex container needs to be bound to the host network. Unfortunately, the default and according to TrueNAS “recommended” way is to leave the “Host network” option turned off.
So I’m pretty sure I will not be the last person to run into this issue.

As soon as I enabled “Host network”, Plex automatically greeted me with a setup screen, allowing me to select the folders for TV Shows, Movies and Music. And now I also see all the Plex server settings that were missing with “Host network” turned off.