Trouble Getting .strm files to play on Linux

[MartinCheetham 6]

Could someone help here please?  My setup is multiple Emby servers and clients on Windows and Linux with a QNAP NAS as the place where all my media is stored.  As I host a non-English audience.  I decided to try to create libraries with non-English metadata which has .strm files pointing to the actual .mkv files which are held on the NAS.  Generally this has worked well.  On a Windows client (with Windows server) the libraries are displayed in foreign language, where it is available, and Movies and TV shows play correctly.  The .strm file just has a pointer to the locally mounted drive on the QNAP.  On the Ubuntu clients (with Linux server), again the libraries are populated with foreign language descriptions of films and TV shows but I simply can't get the content to play (the screen just hangs, no error message).  From the log files I can see "Directory or File does not Exist".  I have tried many variations of the URL in the .strm files such as;

/mnt/Qmultimedia/Movies/<folder>/<film name>.mkv

With this variant I see "file:" prefixed to the URL in the log so I tried adding it;

file:///mnt/Qmultimedia/Movies/<folder>/<film name>.mkv

file://localhost/mnt/Qmultimedia/Movies/<folder>/<film name>.mkv

I have even tried stripping off the <Cr> which one google search told me could be a problem as the files are created on a PC running windows.

I have checked the path using something like;

sudo -u emby ls -la "/mnt/Qmultimedia/Movies/FirstdonoHarm.mkv".

This returns details of the file (so it is found) and is executable;

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3856642267 Feb 24  2022 /mnt/Qmultimedia/Movies/FirstdonoHarm.mkv

(I stripped out the spaces  and brackets in the file name in case this was an issue).

Does anyone know the correct way to format the URL in a .strm file to play a locally mounted .mkv file?

Thanks.

[Lessaj 521]

Out of curiosity, if you mount that share so that locally you can also see "/mnt/Qmultimedia/Movies/FirstdonoHarm.mkv" at the exact same path, does that play?

[MartinCheetham 6]

Yes.  That is the path I use for the English version of the library metadata.  So the mount is fine and the server can see and play the videos.

[Lessaj 521]

No not on the server, I mean on the Ubuntu client.

[MartinCheetham 6]

In fact the local paths are the same but se my original post.  I’ve posted the output of the file list as if I were user EMBY.  So yes the local path is OK.  The .strm file was created using a windows bat file so I’ve also checked that it only has a CR not CRLF as Linux standards.

[Lessaj 521]

The reason I was asking if it works when the file system is mounted on the client that you're playing from because I remember with Emby Theater I was watching something and wondering why it wasn't going through my reverse proxy, it was playing the file directly from my mounted NFS share. Windows doesn't work that way, it was unique to my Linux playback. From a quick check it seems like the newer client doesn't do that, it all goes through my RP as expected.

But okay reading OP again I see that your STRM playback does not work at all for Linux server + Linux client playback. Does it work with Linux server + Windows client?

Otherwise the documentation doesn't seem to cover specifically a local file on Linux, it only shows a Windows path. Sorry, I don't use STRM files, so I'm not otherwise sure about that, but I imagine it should be the same just with the file path using a Linux convention instead of Windows.

[MartinCheetham 6]

Thanks for the comment.  I had not got around to trying the Windows Client/Linux Sever.  It doesn't work.  I also tried Linux Client/Windows Server.  It does work.  So irrespective of the client if the server is Windows it works with the .strm files I've created and if its Linux the strm. files don't play.  Unfortunately it doesn't help me much as I really can't see what I'm doing wrong unless something is broken in the way .strm files are processed.