Handbrake and search paths

[kickhiminthenards]

Hi, so I just wanted to know if anyone has tried out handbrake in the truenas scale-layer yet? It seems really limited in its ability to identify folders, and both truenas and hexOS are kinda limited when it comes to folders as well. I can get into root and so on just fine when digging, but Handbrake can't even see the HDDs pool in /mnt/.

I'm new to Linux, so it's best if you (the reader) don't assume prior knowledge. All I know is that I have certainly been warned about configuring folder permissions in Linux from what I could find online and so on, but I was hoping I wouldn't encounter such issues; but now that I have, I'd very much appreciate if there's anyone who could help me out! Google hasn't been any help for me so far.

Edited March 5 by kickhiminthenards

[Dylan]

Hi @kickhiminthenards - Do you mean identify as in cannot "see" folders or cannot be accessed? If you can browse to a specific path in TrueNAS you should be able to point an app to that path/location. Access to a given folder is, as you've touched upon, another story and likely a permissions issue.

[kickhiminthenards]

1 hour ago, Dylan said:

Hi @kickhiminthenards - Do you mean identify as in cannot "see" folders or cannot be accessed? If you can browse to a specific path in TrueNAS you should be able to point an app to that path/location. Access to a given folder is, as you've touched upon, another story and likely a permissions issue.

Sorry about the way I phrased it, I just wasn't really sure about how to phrase it. Nor am I sure even now. But the app literally can't see the HDDs folder. It can see the /mnt/-folder (as well as the rest of them), but when accessing /mnt/ then it shows nothing within the folder. So I can't select the video files to be encoding with the app. I have no idea why.

[Dylan]

@kickhiminthenards Okay, I'm kinda shooting from the hip here, so please bear with me.

It sounds like a mapping & permissions issue. My fellow mod @Theo posted a really great tutorial on how to install RADARR which I just followed this past weekend. In it, he shows how certain directories need to be created and "mapped" for the app - in this case radarr - along with setting certain permissions. Because Handbrake will be similarly run as a container I suspect there are parallels here.

THIS video shows how to install Handbrake in docker (container) and maybe there are some clues as to how to properly configure Handbrake installation via TrueNAS.

I hope this is even a little helpful and if I'm off-base here, my apologies - totally not trying to send you down the wrong path, only help figure out how to pull this off.

If you DO make some progress, please keep this thread updated as I'm certain others would LOVE your feedback.

Best of luck!!

 

[kickhiminthenards]

@Dylan Thank you for your help! It really helped me get a better understanding of the bigger picture in regards to all this, and it helped me kinda jerryrig my own solution to it.

Thing is, shortly after installing the OS I had also decided to update truenas scale, which I found out later that it isn't recommended to do so. It didn't break anything for me at least, so I just figured it's all good.

But after having wrestled with the guides you sent me, and stumbling upon a random reddit thread, I ended up finding out that the issue causing this whole mess was that I had basically done a "default installation" of pretty much everything in Handbrake when doing it via truenas scale.

So part of what the latest version of electric eel (truenas) did, was change how the apps are handled - and how they are placed, which is more relevant for this - which messed with how handbrake sets up storage paths to "watch" and output from how it's installed.
The people in the reddit thread were talking about how it's essentially a "1-click solution" to change the already-existing apps to fit that update, but they didn't really talk much about when installing from scratch.

Which is where that guide by Theo about radarr and sonarr really helped out, because it made me familiar with the finnicky nature of the storage options and premade datasets when installing something.

So this is what solved it:

(I had already deleted handbrake quite a while ago, so at this point it's without the app installed)

I made a dataset for handbrake, in /mnt/HDDs/Applications/ with permissions set to user, group, and other, with root and read/write/execute (I figured why not, I didn't really feel like taking it one permission at a time and I'm fine with leaving it as it is now, but up to you (the reader) if you want to be more cautious about it).
I did not make a config sub-dataset like the sonarr/radarr guide suggests for sonarr/radarr.

I then installed handbrake with mostly the default options still as they are. However, I left the config storage to iXVolume because I figured it's not something I need to be messing with anywhere other than in the UI for the app and there it was already working fine previously - and then I changed all of the other storage options to Host paths with a folder I've set up myself.
(I should've made more folders for it in order to separate the pre-encoded from the re-encoded video files, but I just wanted to get it over with to see how it goes.)

So I gave it a shot, and it works fine now. Well, kind of.

I still can't see the HDDs folder, although I could at one point during my trials and errors but then it wouldn't give me access so I decided to try something else.

But now the built-in view of "storage" in the app's UI can see the video files just fine, in a place where I can place them; because Applications isn't accessible (nor viewable) to place files in, which is where I'm guessing Handbrake had assigned as its "storage" pathway before.

Anyway, lesson learned without too much harm done, that I'm gonna have to mix things up a bit to work with the updated electric eel version of truenas scale, since HexOS is still meant to be used with the version it came with during its installation.

Thank you for the help! It did push me in the right direction.

[kickhiminthenards]

Or maybe I didn't even need to create that dataset for handbrake since I didn't place the config file manually in it, idk. Anyway, as long as it works then all's well that ends well. (The timer had expired for editing the post, otherwise I would've just added this there.)

[kickhiminthenards]

Uh ok, so after testing things out a bit more, I had to do some more stuff with permissions for the folders. I added a separate watch folder as well, because it'll start encoding whatever is placed in there, on its own.
So about the permissions, I changed all of them to full control in the datasets, as well as created a User - apps in the list of permissions, with "Apply permissions recursively" turned on (I didn't enable it for "child datasets" since I figured the folders doesn't have any manually added datasets below it) and then it worked with sub-folders and normal browsing in handbrake of the video files separated by their own sub-folders.

I don't think I have anything else left to add, and I bet I'm probably the most tech illiterate here, but I hope someone will find it helpful at least.
Keep in mind that I'm using the updated electric eel for truenas scale, so it might be different and maybe even without any problems whatsoever if you're using the version of electric eel that came with the hexOS install.

Edited Thursday at 11:01 AM by kickhiminthenards

[Dylan]

1 hour ago, kickhiminthenards said:

I bet I'm probably the most tech illiterate here

Dude, you just noodled through an installation via TrueNAS, which is non-trivial, and ended up with a working configuration - congrats!

Thank you for your thorough follow up. I am going to add your post as a place holder in our Directory of Guides until or unless a more complete installation write up is submitted - which I totally hope you contribute towards!

Thanks again!!