Emby not finding media

[Vidmaster]

So, I read both the corresponding pages in the manual (jails and plugins) and the lengthy thread in this forum where at least some people seemed to have the same problem as myself. I found that the described solutions there did not seem to work, hence this cry-for-help thread.

The setup is as follows:

I have my FreeNAS 9.3 outfitted with 4 drives, the first 3 are the main 3TB drives in a raid containing all my backuped data while the fourth is a smaller, older, 600GB drive that holds the jails, which is currently only my owncloud and my emby. Emby is supposed to stream the media from the dataset under raid to other devices, e.g. my PS3, main computer and so on.

Okay, after consulting the resources mentioned above I figured that the following was needed:

1.) make certain my backups are accessible, either by setting generous permissions or matching the emby-user and group thing. For the purpose of this thread, I "kept it simple and stupid" and went for the former, that means I have a solid drwxr-xr-x on all the files in my raided dataset (verified via ls -l)
2.) install the emby plugin, which should create a jail (note that for the purpose of this thread, I have deinstalled my previous attempts and performed a fresh install of the plug-in)
3.) add storage to the jail, linking /mnt/mydataset/.../some_media_directory to e.g. /media/my_media . This seemed to have worked, I checked via the jail's console.

Starting up my emby server, no media is found and the directories are not shown, aka they do not exist from emby's perspective (when forcing the path /media/my_media, "path does not exist" is shown though it exists in the jail's console).

Is there a fundamental misunderstanding in my approach or did something went wrong on another level? Why am I asking the later one might wonder? Well, after reinstalling the plug-in, the FreeNAS gui showed for emby's jail all 4 added storages I tried out thus far... Checking the console of the jail, a single one of these added storages is actually present, there is seemingly a hardlink on the /media directory to my /mnt/mydataset/ directory. The install was seemingly not as fresh as I thought or the GUI did something really weird.


Overall feedback to FreeNAS is that I like it a lot thus far, my biggest gripe is the webGui (like I can start a scrub but never see the results? zpool status on the console, thanks a lot) and I really dislike the encryption user experience, which leaves a lot to be desired in my opinion (so much that I have re-backuped my stuff unencrypted). Oh, and the emby-thing of course but I am not entirely certain that this is not a "my bad" kind-off-problem

Any help is greatly appreciated

 

[danb35]

Careful with the terminology, please. You don't have two datasets; you have two pools, each with one or more datasets.

As to viewing the result of a scrub in the GUI, of course you can. It looks like this (click on Storage, select your pool, then click on Volume Status (button at the bottom that looks like a sheet of notebook paper)):

But to the question about Emby seeing your media, I'm curious about step 3. How did you "check via the jail's console"?

 

[Vidmaster]

I opened the console of the jail (via webgui, selecting the jail and pressing the corresponding button at the bottom), navigated to the destination directory that I used when I 'added storage' and checked the contents of that directory.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

so /media/my_media show on the Emby jail command line?
But, not when trying to add the folder in Emby?

If so, it's likely a permission issue. Which doesn't make sense, given that you said the files are 755 permission levels.

 

[Vidmaster]

Okay, first and foremost thanks for your answers people

Regarding my question if there is a fundamental misunderstanding in my approach, I read Joshua's post as answering 'no, in principle it should work like this'. That now raises the question of how exactly can I debug my problem now at to me this seemingly starts with asking how can I enforce a fresh jail installation. As I said, there is might be a configuration issue regarding the storage, as after reinstalling the plug-in (which should delete and create a fresh jail from my point of view) the FreeNAS gui showed for emby's jail all 4 added storages from my previous attempts.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

Okay, first and foremost thanks for your answers people

Regarding my question if there is a fundamental misunderstanding in my approach, I read Joshua's post as answering 'no, in principle it should work like this'. That now raises the question of how exactly can I debug my problem now at to me this seemingly starts with asking how can I enforce a fresh jail installation. As I said, there is might be a configuration issue regarding the storage, as after reinstalling the plug-in (which should delete and create a fresh jail from my point of view) the FreeNAS gui showed for emby's jail all 4 added storages from my previous attempts.

I don't like that way freenas does this, but I think it remembers previous mounts in the Jails > Storage tab. I'd just delete all of them, then add the one you want.