Hey all!

First off im a compleye noob and this is my first server the fact that i havent killed it yet is a great achivement.
Ive tried to find a solution to this question by searching and watching youtube but still not sure.
as i have very little experience with unraid i would need help and guidence like a 5 year or learning to fold clothes.

My server will be used for storage, Plex and when i understand how to set it up my own cloud.

I think i got the hang of installing Plex guides there are straightforward
My problem is how to get my Media into Plex. I have allready made folders and transfered all my music, videos and tv shows to my server from my old hdd before putting them into the server i had no choice.
So now i do have seperate shares for Tv, movies and music and im trying to find out if i can use this existing shares to get the media into Plex, all guides ive see tells me to make a media share specific for plex and then add folders in plex that will get into that share.
Can i somhow perhaps make a Plex media share with folders for Tv, movies, music, photos etc and link them to the other shares or something or will i have to move all the media inside that plex share insted.
One reason im asking is that in my cloud share i have different movie tutorials that i wanna have acces to via cloud in the future but that i for now also would like to get in plex so i gan get acces to them untill the day i can setup the cloud.

Again im sorry if this solution is allready out here if it is then im to noob to understand how to set it up.
I would really appreciate it if anyone can help me and tell me how to get this problem solved and what i need to do to make it happend.
If there is no other way then moving the media i guess i will but then i will not have acces to all my tutorial material since that i will not move.

Thanks

 

18 minutes ago, Grimner said:

My problem is how to get my Media into Plex.

There are a couple of ways to do this but it is all about volume mappings in the Plex docker.

 

You can either just create a top-level folder called "Media" or something like that and then have sub-folders for each media type (movies, photos, music, etc.) or you can have a top-level folder for each media type and map those to libraries in Plex

 

I do the latter, a share (top-level folder for each media type).  Here are examples of some my docker volume mappings:

 

 

The host path is the Unraid path to the media; /mnt/user/Movies, mnt/user/Music, etc.

 

The container path is the path you will use in Plex to tell it to find the media on the host (Unraid shares), /movies, /music, /tv, etc.

 

If you just have a top-level media folder, you will have only one volume mapping, e.g /mnt/Media to /media and in Plex, you would specify /media/Movies, /media/Music, etc. depending on what media type sub-folders you have.

 

In Plex, it looks like this the way I do it: 

 

For Movies Library, the folder is /movies (container path mapped in Plex docker)  If you just had a Media top-level folder but a Movies sub-folder, it would be /media/Movies

 

 

Edited March 24, 20233 yr by Hoopster

Ah so i hope i understand it now.
The docker setup can point to my individual media type shares on my server and that would go into subfolders in these shares aswell if i dont want the entire share in that specific media folder, say cloud for example has many different subfolders but im only interested in the video material there so i could add it like say (mnt/user/clud/tutorials)?

Then in plex when i setup the library i will make one for each of my folders.

i will give it a try and if i dont get it to work i will assume i did it in the mirror way and try again.

Big thanks Hoopster i think i might have understood it, perhaps it wasnt as complicated that i was afraid it was gona be but hey when you are new to something it can be intimidating. I will check back with news if i got it working or not:)
Thanks again.

6 hours ago, Grimner said:

Ah so i hope i understand it now.

The best way to think about this is that the source, a.k.a the host (Unraid) and the target, a.k a. the container (Plex) both have their own filesystems and that the target/container cannot use the filesystem of the host directly. 

 

Basically, the volume mapping examples I used in my first post are translation tables that tell the Plex container how to get to the source media by mapping a source/host path to a target/container path.  So, /mnt/user/Movies (my Movies share on Unraid) becomes just /movies to Plex. 

 

If you just have a parent Media share on Unraid and sub-folders for content, /mnt/user/Media on Unraid becomes /media in Plex.  However, in Plex you would then have to specify the media type sub-folder for each Library.  In this example, you need more than just /media in Plex or it will look in all sub-folders so, for movies the folder would be /media/Movies for the Plex Movies Library.