How do you get recordings to be automatically deleted after they’re played?
I’ve edited all my TV shows and under “advanced” set auto delete to “after next refesh”. I’ve refreshed multiple times and waited for days. All the watched shows are still there. I’ve tried setting them to “after 1 day”, and weeks later still nothing ever gets deleted.
Does this feature work for anybody else?
I’ve verified that after they’ve been played the little gold corner goes away, and the show’s menu changes from “mark as played” to “mark as unplayed”. I can look at the play history and see that they’ve been played.
Is there some sort of API I can use to write an application I can run as a cron job to remove recordings that have been played?
Under Server > Settings > Library, logged in as server owner account. These should be enabled.
Empty trash automatically after every scan
Allow media deletion
Scan the library.
They’ve always been enabled (and still are). Yet nothing ever seems to get auto-deleted.
I’m curious: to what does “On Next Refresh” refer in the library settings for delete episodes after playing? (I’ve tried both that and “After a Day” with the same result.)
This worked for me during last seasons NBA. I had games set to delete after 3 days, watched or not. The files were removed from the file system, what was not removed however, was the entries in the library. They never went anywhere and required being manually deleted.
If you have gone into each Recording and changed the advanced to be Keep x episodes and Delete after 1 day of watching the next suspect would be file permissions.
Would need debug logs and system details to get any further but it does work. Usually people set those options and delete files they didn’t intend on.
I don’t think that’s it. The server runs as the “plex” user. That’s the user that owns all of the recording directories and files. The directories are all “rwx” and the files are all “rw”. I can delete episodes from the web UI. I can log in as the plex user from the command line and ‘rm’ episode files.
Does it matter that the files have been transcoded by a post-processing script and are now .mkv files instead of .ts files?
I was never able to get Plex’s auto delete function to work. No matter how I configured it or how long I waited, nothing ever got deleted. It’s pretty disappointing that such a basic DVR feature doesn’t work, and no support is offered.
After wasting hours trying to get the Plex server to do what it was supposed to, I finally gave up and spent 10 minutes setting up a cron job to run PlexCleaner. That works perfectly.
It’s a good think Plex has outside developers who are willing to pick up the slack.
Just curious, do you watch your content under your Plex admin account or do you watch using a separate managed user or Plex Home account?
The option says something like “number of days after the Plex Admin has watched to delete the content” so I’m wondering if you watched as the Plex admin or not.
… do you watch your content under your Plex admin account or do you watch using a separate managed user or Plex Home account?
That’s a good question — and the answer is I don’t know what a “separate managed user” or “Plex Home account” is. I watch shows using the PlexConnect Kodi plugin and the VLC DLNA (PnP) client. Perhaps that’s why the built in delete function doesn’t work.
The PlexCleaner Python app is still working exactly as expected. It’s way easier to set up than the built-in delete feature (which has to be configured individually for every show).
I have struggled to make deletion work correctly since I started using DVR.
Would like to see this fixed as well as it is an annoyance.
Works for some series and not for others.
I have to open in Web Manager and delete from there as I cannot delete manually from ROKU Plex App.
