SOLVED: "Playback failed due to a fatal player error" for external drive

[help_me_please]

Hello, Jellyfin troubleshooting forum and thanks in advance.

I'm running Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS and just set it up for Jellyfin recently after moving from Plex. I have all my video files on an external HDD and was having trouble getting Jellyfin to recognize that the path to the drive was legitimate. Luckily, apparently this is a common problem and I found this reddit thread which solved my problem. I successfully watched one episode of a show. When I came back to watch some more later, I got the error in the title. This happens for every show.

I figured this could have something to do with the external HDD, so I took one of my shows out of the external HDD and put it in the documents folder on my main HDD. Sure enough, the videos played. However, even with this info, I can't find anyone who's had the same problem. I'm not too familiar with Ubuntu or Linux in general so I can get logs if needed if you tell me how to get them.

Thanks.

[TheDreadPirate]

99% certain this is due to how udisk2 mounts external hard drives.

Your options are to manually mount the hard drive so that the ACL is not applied or to remove the ACL.

I wrote a guide in the walkthrough sub-forum for this process and a basic Linux permissions primer.

https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-mounting-lo...ons-primer

[help_me_please]

99% certain this is due to how udisk2 mounts external hard drives.

Your options are to manually mount the hard drive so that the ACL is not applied or to remove the ACL.

I wrote a guide in the walkthrough sub-forum for this process and a basic Linux permissions primer.

https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-mounting-lo...ons-primer

This is a great writeup and I appreciate it. I mounted my drive to a folder in media (/media/easy in my case) and unmounting and remounting via the fstab file does work. However, still no luck on Jellyfin. I'm trying to change the owner of the external drive to the jellyfin group since the jellyfin user is a member of that group. I use the following commands while in /media/easy:

sudo chown -R root:jellyfin /media/easy
sudo chown -R :jellyfin /media/easy

I also tried both of these while in /media. But when I run an ls -l command, it still shows root and the owner user and group. What am I doing wrong here?

[TheDreadPirate]

Can you share the output of "ls -l /media"? Do you see a "+" at the end of the permissions on /media/easy?

It would look like this.

Code:

rwxr-xr-x+

[help_me_please]

I see a + at the end of my user folder, but not the easy folder.

Code:

total 12
drwxrwxrwx+ 2 media media 4096 Dec 26 18:48 andrew
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8192 Dec 27 18:02 easy

[TheDreadPirate]

Code:

sudo chown -R jellyfin: /media/easy
sudo chmod -R 755 /media/easy

[help_me_please]

Ok, ran both of those and restarted and still no luck. If it helps, running ls -l /media gives the exact same output as before.

[help_me_please]

Just wanted to add a clarification: this external drive is formatted via NTFS. I bring this up because I found this post on the Ubuntu forums saying that FAT32 and NTFS file systems don't need specific ownership for users to read and write.

[help_me_please]

Alright, I feel so dumb. After doing all the permissions stuff I forgot to go back and change my Jellyfin libraries to the new mounted path. After I changed that, everything is good now. Thank you @TheDreadPirate for all your help!