Jess Hallsworth
1ba03dca70
Watch data cannot tell you what is valuable, only what is unwatched. Some content is held deliberately - home video, 4K copies that are expensive to re-acquire, shows kept in case someone wants them later - and that judgement has to be stated by a human and be un-overridable by the score. One 'keep' concept, applied at four levels: library (a rule, so future additions inherit it), show, season, movie. Explicit marks below the library can point either way, so 'keep all of 4K Movies except this one' is expressible rather than a dead end. The important detail is identity. Plex reassigns ratingKeys on library rebuilds and rematches, so marks are keyed on content guid instead - (library_id, guid) for movies and shows, (library_id, show_guid, season_number) for seasons. A keep list that silently detaches from its content would, in v2, mean deleting something explicitly protected. That is now the single most important test in the suite. Marks are scoped per library on purpose: Movies and 4K Movies share guids, so an unscoped mark would protect both copies at once. Also: kept items hidden from the grid by default with a toggle; a Kept items screen that surfaces orphaned marks rather than carrying them silently; the dashboard always shows never-played / kept / available as three numbers so a growing keep list cannot quietly hollow out the report; nightly export of keeps and views to JSON, since they are the only data in the database not reconstructible from Plex and Tautulli; and v2 deletion refuses kept items ahead of every other guardrail. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01GVbG48GAXfCZatcmX123Ra
4.5 KiB
MediaShelf
A self-hosted web app for figuring out which of the thousands of files in a Plex library are actually worth keeping.
MediaShelf scans a Plex Media Server over its HTTP API and pulls watch history from Tautulli, builds a local snapshot of every movie and TV season, and joins together facts that are never shown side by side — date added, size on disk, file path, owning library, watch count, last watched, and how much of it anyone actually finished — into a sortable, filterable, chartable grid with a tunable reclaim score that ranks deletion candidates.
Status
v1 is report-only. MediaShelf does not delete, move, or modify anything. It produces a ranked list, saved rule sets, and CSV export. Deletion is designed for in the roadmap but deliberately not built, so the scanner and the scoring model can be trusted before anything destructive is wired up.
Nothing is implemented yet — this repository holds the design plus the read-only tools
used to validate it. The design has been checked against the live servers: 65.7 TB across
24 libraries, 2,930 movies and 2,807 TV seasons, 87,640 logged plays from 60 users, and
27.4 TB never played. See docs/design.md §2.1.
What it does
- Full-library ingest from Plex, no agent on the Plex host, no filesystem mounts
- Movies at item level, TV rolled up to season level
- Watch data from Tautulli, so plays by every account are counted and a play that was abandoned after five minutes is distinguished from one that was finished — Plex's own history reports those identically. Falls back to Plex session history if Tautulli is unavailable, and says so rather than degrading silently
- Sort and filter on every metric; charts for size by library, additions over time, finished vs. abandoned vs. never-opened by size, and size vs. last-watched
- A weighted reclaim score with live sliders, and grace rules so it never recommends something you added last week
- Named, re-runnable saved views — "unwatched, older than 2 years, over 10 GB", "two people started it and nobody finished it"
- Keep marks at library, series, season or movie level, for the things you are holding on purpose — home video, 4K copies, shows you might want someday. Kept items are hidden from the working grid and refused outright by deletion. Marks are keyed on Plex content GUIDs rather than rating keys, so they survive a library rebuild
- CSV export of any view
Planned stack
Python + Flask, SQLite (WAL), vanilla JS front-end, single container deployed as a Portainer stack behind Nginx Proxy Manager.
Roadmap
- v2 — two-stage quarantine-then-purge deletion, with authentication, a path allowlist, and an audit log
- v3 — Emby and Jellyfin support behind the existing
MediaProviderabstraction
Validating the design first
Plex and Tautulli are both LAN-only, so tools/probe.py exists to check this design
against real data from inside the network. It is read-only — GET requests only,
nothing is modified — and has no dependencies beyond the standard library.
export PLEX_BASE_URL=http://192.168.1.10:32400
export PLEX_TOKEN=...
export TAUTULLI_BASE_URL=http://192.168.1.100:8181
export TAUTULLI_API_KEY=...
python3 tools/probe.py # library shapes, sizes, coverage horizon
python3 tools/probe.py --dump inventory.json # plus a full item inventory
python3 tools/reclaim_preview.py # the actual reclaim numbers
reclaim_preview.py joins Plex sizes to Tautulli plays the way the application will, and
reports never-played bytes per library — split into the confident pool (added while
Tautulli was watching, never played) and the uncertain pool (predates Tautulli, might
have been watched). It also prints the largest never-played TV seasons and the
watcher-count distribution used to calibrate the score.
It reports Tautulli's coverage horizon, the finished/abandoned/never-opened split across real plays, library shapes and sizes, path roots, multi-version items, and whether Tautulli is actually watching the Plex server you think it is. Credentials are redacted from all output including error messages, so the result is safe to paste anywhere.
Documentation
docs/design.md— the full software designtools/probe.py— read-only reconnaissance scripttools/reclaim_preview.py— read-only reclaim numberstools/mockserver.py— mock Plex/Tautulli for testing the probe