Path to SD Card

[Tsch3ns 14]

Dear community,

I am currently trying to set up Emby for my father on the "Emporia" (android-based) senior tablet. The installation worked without problems. I copied the movies to the SD card. However, I want them in different folders, and that's where the problem starts.
At first I didn't know the path to the SD card (emby does not offer any navigation when I add a library path), then I saw the path to the metadata in the Emby settings, it is:
/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.emby.embyserver/files/metadata.

So I stored the movies in the "Movies" folder, which is on the same level as "Android". Unfortunately this only works for movies that are directly in this folder, but subfolders like Movies/Movies or /Movies/Series don't work.

The paths in the emby settings which I already tried and which are NOT accepted are:

/storage/emulated/0/Movies/Series

/storage/emulated/0/Movies/Movies

/storage/emulated/0/Emby/Movies

 

It only works with:

/storage/emulated/0/Movies

 

When navigating through the SD card on my Computer, the "Android" as well as the "Movies" and the "Emby" folders are on the highest level of the SD card folder structure. The "Movies" folder is obviously part of the Android system, the "Emby" folder was generated by myself.

What am I doing wrong?
Thanks a lot,
Jens

[Tsch3ns 14]

I can answer my question myself, maybe it will be helpful for someone in the future.

I opened the SD card with the goolge file explorer and I pressed on a file and selected "properties". This showed me the REAL path:

/storage/50A6-13B16//Movies/...

With this setting, it works!

Jens

[Luke 37067]

Thanks for following up!

@Carlo fyi

[Carlo 4330]

Google in their infinite wisdom has made storage a really complicated endeavor in recent Android versions. We have real and emulated paths as you found out as well.

Then hardware vendors often put their own flavor of changes on top or replacing changes and it becomes a complicated mess of access rights, privileges, locations, etc...

I was putting together some information to try and start documenting this but found with just my own dozen or Android devices it was getting crazy trying to figure out what paths to use. I personally don't recommend using Android to host an Emby Server using local storage unless you're willing to put in the time to discover the paths the device hardware will allow as well as the OS version. And then making sure you can set the access rights and privileges correct as well.

Google has done the community no justice with their storage updates and OS changes recently and that's the "best" I can say.

Carlo

[kakashi55 9]

On 9/30/2023 at 9:36 AM, Carlo said:

I personally don't recommend using Android to host an Emby Server using local storage

I have emby server on three different phones running Android 8, 10 and 12 respectively. I never had any problem with privilege, access etc. You can look at the exact path of a folder from any file manager and put it in Emby server. I use SD card also. It's super easy.

Currently, as per my knowledge, Emby server is the only server officially supported on Android phones and it works so well. Plex is only for Nvidia shield and crashes on Android phones.

So, Thanks for the Emby server for Android Phones.