My #Jellyfin and #Plex setup are pretty similar, i.e. on #Debian/#Ubuntu VMs with a mount pointing to my #SMB share from my #NAS, using native installations rather than #Docker, etc. I just noticed though, that there are some of my media folders that I currently have setup using relative symlinks.. for example:
MyMedia -> ../Videos/Mediaand the videos within them (of which are mostly also relative symlinks) are not appearing/discovered on Jellyfin, when they do on Plex. The result is, based on my example, my media library on Jellyfin, which is pointing to a folder that contains various other folders including "MyMedia", is not able to discover the "MyMedia" folder - it only displays folders that are actual folders and not symlinks. Can someone tell if this is expected, and something not supported on Jellyfin?
I also have instances where I have movies stored in my Movies media folder, then have a (relative) symlink pointing to the movie from, for example, an anime's "Specials" folder so that users can discover/watch them as a standalone movie, or alongside their TV series progress - I'm wondering now if those files are also not appearing too since they too are symlinks.
On the server itself, both Jellyfin and Plex, the mount is configured exactly the same, and simply using
ls, it doesn't seem either of them have difficulty or different behaviours following the "trail" from the symlink to the target file or folder.---
Edit: From what I've found so far, it seems that Jellyfin straight up ignores symlink files, which is... ridiculous. I know I can prolly use hardlinks, at least I expect I can, but that's just so stupid and not what I want.
A lot of my home videos are organised in such a way that relies heavily on relative symlinks, so that one video can be linked to several folders (i.e. my personal folder and my family's etc. if it's related to them), and that they're easy to trace. I even do this for photos, so I can link a single photo into multiple folders (i.e. who's in them, the event that took place, etc.) without taking up additional space.
I also use relative links, instead of absolute links, so that they can be read/followed on no matter what system of mine I'm using that has the SMB share mounted - regardless of their mount point (i.e. #Linux and #macOS have different file structure etc.).
Ngl out of all hitches I've encountered in my migration from Plex to Jellyfin, this might be the most bitter pill I'm to swallow - cos I don't think I can work around this, reasonably, without making changes to my SMB share that I'm not only using for Jellyfin, but a lot of other things as well for me to even consider tailor/catering it solely for Jellyfin and potentially break the workflow of a lot of other things I rely on.
https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-can-t-read-symlink-files https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5521forum.jellyfin.orgCan't read symlink filesHello!, I'm trying to figure out why my Jellyfin setup can't read symlink files, I'm following this guide to locally mount my debrid files through rclone on a new path /mnt/jellyfin, no problems there
