Question about content metadata and media storage

[archangelz 13]

I was doing some clean-up and renaming of movies and TV files in my NAS and it just seemed like I lost some HDD space on my mediabrowser server. Basically a lot of my legacy content was stored with whatever inconsistent naming and now I'm using sickbeard and couchpotato to rename everything consistently in properly named folder. This causes mediabrowser to re-ingest/re-identify a lot of the files and these show up as new. 

 

My question is, is the metadata that mediabrowser server shows tied to a specific movie/episode or is it tied to the actual file name that you have for the show itself?

So if I had different resolution for the same movie, would the metadata/images/poster art be downloaded and cached for each media file or is mediabrowser smart enough to reuse the same poster art and metadata?

What about show deletion? Does mediabrowser delete the metadata/image/poster art when a media file is removed?

 

Just wanted a few of these questions answered before I started looking at the missing disk space and where 5 GBs went. 

[ebr 14904]

Most information is tied to a unique ID that is derived from the file path.  This allows different versions of the "same" item to have different metadata.

 

The exception to this is user-based information like watched status, resume point, favorite, etc.  That is stored based on the provider identification of the item (tmdb, tvdb etc.).  This is so that information is not lost if the item is relocated or just the file name changes.

 

I believe now when we delete something we try and delete all of it but that won't always work because we can't always be sure exactly what may have been a part of that item (could be components downloaded by other programs or provided from somewhere else).

[archangelz 13]

So... is there any way to clean up these orphaned metadata/media files. Since mediabrowser has a link and knows about all active content, could it not go through and clean up these records? 

 

Just curious about that, limited HDD space on the small SSD I have for mediabrowser server and the storage is all my NAS elsewhere. 

[Luke 37012]

In theory yes it's possible but we don't have that feature at the moment.