Will Not Play Movies on unRaid with Symbolic links

[ctfisher]

Hello,

I finally jumped on the DVR bandwagon due to the local media library features that are being added so THANK YOU!

I cannot get the Apple TVs to be playback MKVs that are setup using symbolic links in unRaid. To optimize space and speed, the movies live in the array on HDDs while all the metadata is stored on an SSD. The proper folder structures are setup on the SSD while just the appropriately named movie files are just dropped in a single Movie folder on the HDD. A symbolic link to the movie file is created in the appropriate folder over on the SSD.

When setting up Channels DVR server, I initially pointed to the real movie files on the HDD drive. After the import, only a handful of movies had the poster and it looked pretty... ugly and had a very low WAF (wife acceptance factor). After playing around with the configuration, I got it to load from the SSD where the metadata is kept and the library looks MUCH better. Only downside was no TV episode pictures but I can figure that out later. Now when I tried to watch a show on the Apple TV, it quickly just went back to the detail screen. So I pulled it up on the server backend and got an error while trying to view the video details.

Has anyone tried this setup? I know when they were loaded from the HDD folder, I could see the movie details in the backend.

Screenshots from SSD load:

Screenshot from HDD load:

Thanks

[racameron]

Does Channels have permissions on the source files?

[ctfisher]

I believe so. In the first set of screenshots, it loaded the poster file and metadata from the .nfo files. In last screenshot I just added, there is no episode info.

Both shares have read only permissions.

[tmm1]

What are the errors on the Log tab?

[ctfisher]

Here is the log tab

[tmm1]

Are you sure the symlinks are pointing to the right place? Seems like the files cannot be accessed

[ctfisher]

Yes. The sym link files play fine in MrMC and when going through the unRaid web interface. I’m hoping to consolidate everything in Channels since that’s the primary TV/Cable channel app everyone uses here.

Here is screenshot from unRaid web gui. If you look in the background, you can see that the file size is listed in the directory view.

Come to think of it, MrMC allows you to specify a user name and password. I will play around with the permissions a little bit.

[ctfisher]

I also noticed that any sym link folders do not show up in the Channels DVR server backend when selecting a folder to import. The user shares are there but drilling into the share does not show sym link folders.

Here are unraid user share permissions showing the guest has read only acces:

Here is the library setup in DVR backend:

[ctfisher]

I copied the actual file into a subdirectory.

Scanning the sources again picked up the new file in the backend and the details are viewable.

The file can also be played in the browser.

I created a sym link of the file in the same test folder.

Scanning the sources picks up the sym link version and it cannot detect the file details.

At this point, I don’t think it’s a permission issue; it’s something related to using the sym link.

[ctfisher]

Alright! Figured it out. I need to use relative sym links to make it work because of the docker container and the mounting paths.

Here is the proof:

Also found someone else who figured this out:

r/PleX - Symbolic Links Not Working with Plex

Thank you for the questions. It led me to digging a little deeper.