New Media Source Won't Scan

[TheDreadPirate]

How, exactly, are users supposed to use network locations for media in their servers when this change is forced?

You don't.  You map network locations to drive letters.

The veil threat of "being stuck" isn't helpful without noting what is changing, why and how to transition.

It isn't a "threat".  Jellyfin is changing.  Software changes, sometimes in significant ways that not everyone will like.

But this change is being made in the pursuit of improving the maintainability of Jellyfin's code.

I'm sure I won't be the only user wondering WTF as I've been going through this current issue without receiving any actual explination or guidence, including from the official wiki.

You aren't the only one.  And this is the reason, starting with 10.9, adding new network shares wasn't allowed in anticipation that in 10.10 using unmapped/unmounted network shares would go away entirely.

And this is not new.  We've long stated that network shares should be mounted to the OS.  Mapped to a drive letter in Windows and mounted to a directory in Linux.  We've stated this in our matrix/discord chat, on various forum posts, in Github tickets, and in our documentation (see below).

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/admini...ge#storage   (the storage section hasn't changed in two years)

You've also organized your files in a particular way.  While this organization doesn't make it impossible to have it work with Jellyfin, it does add a lot of tedious work.

We are telling you how Jellyfin works/behaves and how to best work with that behavior.  But you've been unwilling to reorganize (I don't blame you) or do the work to get Jellyfin to work with your current organization.  You keep going back to how you used to do things (you even reverted to 10.8.13).  But, like I said, software changes and not everyone will like it.  In this case, the change is needed for long term maintainability.

I, and I'm sure many people here, feel your pain.  When I first started using Jellyfin I spent a literal week fighting Jellyfin so I didn't have to rename and reorganize how I had my files pre-Jellyfin.  Then I gave up and spent a day getting my media to conform to what Jellyfin works best with.  It takes much much less time to make Jellyfin happy than to fight it.  And since you are interacting with Jellyfin (or Kodi), and not the files and folders, it makes sense to conform to Jellyfin's expectation.