Plex Media Server add-on accessing network NAS storage drive

I have searched for hours trying to figure out how to add/link/connect/ a network NAS storage drive to show up as an available library folder in the Plex Media Server add-in set up. When I get to the point in the plex setup where I am asked to select the folder containing my media, all that shows are the main folders located in hassio on my RPi4. Do i need a USB storage device connected directly to my pi? if so, how would I make that available for Plex to see? I’m a noob.

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That’s a good question i’ve been struggling with this as well, too bad there’s no replies to this thread. Kinda makes you wonder why there’s an addon for plex media server without NAS support.

Hello,
Did either of you get an answers to this? I am trying to connect Plex addon to my NAS4FREE server.

Cheers

Unfortunately I don’t think you will be able to do this using the Plex Home Assistant add-on and Home Assistant OS. The workaround is to install Debian or another Linux distro on your machine, install Home Assistant Supervised, and Plex as a Docker container instead of HA addon. You will have more control over your OS so you can mount USB drives, network drives, etc. I use this setup and it works great.

Before going this route, you should test and see if transcoding video on Plex is even feasible on an rPI4. It wasn’t functional on an rPI3 or Asus Tinkerboard S (comparable specs to rPI4). Put a sample video on your SD card and try transcoding it.

Hi @dwinnn ,
Thanks for the reply. Ah I see. To make it a bit clearer, I already have HA installed on a Dell laptop (Intel i5) running Unbuntu 18lts. I am a total learner at Linux and mostly HA as well, I think when following the tutorial I installed Docker but its a few months back .
So your advice of running Plex in docker may be the go, once I get my head round where to start.
Cheers
Simon

That is also how I started learning Home Assistant and Linux. I’m sure you will get familiar with it! Definitely spend time learning how to install Docker containers. There are some really cool ones out there like Plex, Transmission, Radarr, Sonarr that can make your machine into an awesome media server. Good thing you have an x86 machine so that you can use the 'local-persist’ plugin to share one volume across multiple containers. There is a lot to learn, but do one thing at a time. A few things you can learn right now:

  • mount a USB or network drive at startup
  • install VNC server (for easier file management) if you have a UI installed on your distro
  • Learn Docker-compose or Portainer, since most containers will give you docker-compose.yml files. Portainer helps to visually understand each Docker container’s settings
  • Install Plex container. I use this one

can you just put the UNC path into that box ?

eg.

\\192.168.0.2\Share\Movies\
2 Likes

It does not work. I am also still looking for the solution

I found this thread whilst facing the same problem, then I found this add-on - hassio-addons/plex at master · alexbelgium/hassio-addons · GitHub - hope that helps someone.