Plex Can't Find My Files. Easy Fix!

Plex can't find my files!
This is a common complaint with Linux users and
many fixes aren't so easy.
Until now.

Mount your media drives so they can be accessed by Plex in a few simple steps.
After hours of wading through posts of how to get Plex to recognize your media drives I have come up with a simple solution that does not require changing your fstab file or changing permissions of your drive.

It also doesn't require you to change the user to root in the Plex config file. Instead I will show you how to change permissions of the folder where your hard drives are mounted.

This tutorial assumes that your hard drives are mounted in file system/media/(User Name) folder.
If your drives are mounted in a different folder then use that path with these instructions.

First we need to mount you hard drive(s) that contain your movie / tv files.

Next open the file system folder. You do this by clicking on File System in the side bar of your file browser.

Now right click on a blank area of that screen and select "Open as Administrator"
Enter your password in the permissions box.

A new window will open up. You are now in the File System folder and have root permissions.

Right click on the media folder and select Properties.
From the Properties window select the Permissions tab at the top.

Change the Owner to your user name. Change folder access to Create and Delete files.

Next change Group to your user name and in the Folder Access area change it to Access Files.

Under Others change Folder Access to Access Files.

Now click on Apply Permissions to Enclosed files.

Double click on the media folder to open it.
You will see a folder with your user name.
Do the same as you did above using the same steps.

When finished close the file browser windows.
Unmount you hard drives and restart your pc or you can use the following command to restart the Plex Media service;

sudo service plexmediaserver restart

Now mount your hard drive(s)
Open Plex and have it scan your media drive(s).
It should now recognize the drive and files and add them to your library.

Enjoy and hope this was helpful.

TaZ

Streamtuner Shoutcast Plugin Oddity

I have to really wonder if the continuing Shoutcast problem in Streamtuner is in fact caused by the Ubuntu kernel.
I ask this question out loud after installing Vector Linux which is based on Slackware using Linux Kernel version 2.6.27.12

After I installed Vector Linux on an older 1 Ghz computer I saw that Streamtuner was preinstalled. Curious as to whether it would work properly or not I fired it up.
To my surprise, not only did the Shoutcast tab work perfectly but Punkcast and basic.ch plugins were installed and working properly.

Now it is possible that the good people involved with Vector Linux may have patched the plugin or it may be the latest Streamtuner release works as it should in Vector while still causing problems in Ubuntu.

I've also read that other distros don't have problems with the Streamtuner Shoutcast plugin that was recently released.
Yet it seems most Ubuntu users are still having problems with it.

I plan to take a look at the Vector install and the plugin they are using in an attempt to put this to rest once and for all.
I like Streamtuner and have not found anything that compares to it. So I'm not going to give up the fight to get this fixed properly.

TaZ

Shoutcast Bug In Streamtuner

So last week I fired up Streamtuner. It's been awhile since I have used it to listen to online music now that I have been using Songbird, so I was a bit upset when I couldn't get any listings for the Shoutcast feed.
At first I thought there was a glitch with their server but after a few days of checking it, I found it was still not working.
So I went digging.

Turns out that Shoutcast changed their website. The old Streamtuner plug-in doesn't work with the new design. What needed to be done was to fire up a hex editor and update the plug-in. But not an update that would use their new site feed. Nope! That would require a full rewrite of the plug-in code.

What I did was to find the Shoutcast address in the plug-in and change it to the new address that points to the old site that Shoutcast is maintaining.

Here's what you need to do in order to fix the Shoutcast plug-in.
Fire up your favorite hex editor and use it to open up the shoutcast.so plug-in found in usr/lib/streamtuner/plugins.
Now search for the two instances of www.shoutcast.com and replace them with 205.188.234.120 making sure you keep the spacing sane.
Now save it back into your folder.
Open up Streamtuner and go to the Shoutcast tab. You should now see your listings. If your don't just click on the Reload button.

For those of you who are saying that you don't know how to use a hex editor, no worries.
Here is a link to the patched shoutcast plug-in.
Download Plugin

Copy the plug-in, go to usr/lib/streamtuner/plugins folder. Open it as Root. Delete the existing shoutcast.so file and paste this patched file in to the folder.
Now open up Streamtuner, go to the Shoutcast tab and your listings should show up.

This is only a quick fix as it doesn't allow Streamtuner to access the new Shoutcast site and categories. Streamtuner itself needs to be fixed. I believe the original designer quit the project several years ago as there haven't been any updated versions. But I do believe there are some people maintaining it and hopefully they will release a newer 'fixed' version.

Update!!!

Thanks to Ernie for this easy fix that offers more functionality.

An alternative solution can be to edit your hosts file (/etc/hosts) and add the following line:
205.188.234.120 www.shoutcast.com
That overrides the shoutcast.com ip address provided by the DNS. It fixes the issue and you can access the webpage from the browser too.

Thanks again Ernie!


Enjoy!

TaZMAn