With the prices of hard drives, I’v been forced to move some of my titles to an external drive on my NAS. Can I add this drive share to jellyfin if it isn’t in the “media path” that was established in sparkbox?
5 replies
Chris wrote:
Yes, but it has to be set up in a specific way. Jellyfin can only see the folders inside your SparkBox media folder, so a drive that sits outside it will not appear by itself. The way to do it is to mount the NAS share inside that media folder on the box, for example as a folder called Movies2, and then add that folder in Jellyfin as a new library. Jellyfin reads it like any other library after that. One thing to get right if you make the mount start automatically: add the option nofail to its line, so the box still starts when the NAS is offline. To give you exact steps, tell me two things: what the box runs on (a NAS, Windows with WSL, or a Linux PC), and whether the NAS share is already mounted on it today.
Wolf21 wrote:
Sparkbox is running on a Intel NUCi7 on Linux mint 22.3. It's media share is on a qnap folder share which is mounted and sparkbox sees it just fine. I have connected an external drive on the qnap and created a new drive share. The linux mint mounts the drive just find and I can see all of the media on that share using nemo. I would like to add this share to jellyfin, without affecting the media share assigned to sparkbox. Can't I add an include Directive into the yaml file for jellyfin, and create a secondary YAML file that includes my extra media paths/folders for jellyfin. This way I can modify the secondary yaml file so that it survives any updates. The primary yaml file would just need to read in the secondary yaml (if it exists). This way non of the other apps that depend on sparkbox media path are effected.
Chris wrote:
Yes, and there is a simpler route that needs no extra file. SparkBox does not read a second YAML file, so leave Jellyfin's own files alone; they are replaced on updates. Instead, mount the new QNAP share as a folder inside your media folder, so Jellyfin sees it as part of its library. A mount in your system's fstab survives SparkBox updates, because SparkBox never touches it. One-time steps on the Mint box: 1. Show your media folder path: grep '^MEDIAROOT=' /opt/sparkbox/.env (paste only that line here). 2. Check the type your current QNAP share uses: findmnt -t cifs,nfs. 3. Create the folder: sudo mkdir -p "<your media folder/Movies2" 4. Add a line to /etc/fstab that mounts the new share at that folder, with nofail in its options. Keep any share password in a root-only credentials file, the same way your current share does. 5. Test it: sudo mount -a, then findmnt "<your media folder/Movies2" should show the new share. 6. Restart Jellyfin so it picks up the mount: sudo sparkbox restart media jellyfin-media 7. In Jellyfin, add a library and choose the folder /media/Movies2. Use fstab rather than the desktop auto-mount, which only exists while you are logged in. SparkBox waits at boot for fstab mounts inside the media folder before it starts the apps. Send me the path from step 1 if you want me to check the fstab line before you reboot.
Wolf21 wrote:
The instructions that you provided worked.
Chris wrote:
Glad to hear it's working, thanks for confirming. If the NAS share ever goes missing from Jellyfin after a reboot, reply here with what findmnt shows for your Movies2 folder and we'll take it from there.