The problem: Sometimes you need to delete things to make more space. Deleting big things gets space back faster.
If you store movies in folders, windows can’t easily sort folders by the filesize of their contents, which makes it hard to figure out which movies might be hogging space due to inefficient encodes or multiple redundant versions of a video. Some tools can figure this out for you (e.g. SpaceSniffer) but they can be very slow especially when your library folders are on a slow NAS.
The solution:
Plex knows the filesize for all indexed videos, and allows you to delete files directly from the web app. Plex allows you to sort by other metadata like date added, resolution, duration etc - but not filesize. If filesize was added to the list of sort options within a library, we’d have an easy way to identify and clean out or re-encode large files.
Thanks for the tip! I’ve just been exploring that … actually the first time I’ve installed any plex plugin :-"
It looks like you need to select movie export level 5 in the ExportTools configuration to get filesize information out into an excel file, which seems quite slow to export, and then I ended up with an ‘internal error, please check the logs’ message. I’ll definitely play around with this some more and I’ll bet it gives loads of possibilities, but it doesn’t seem much better than using any other slow 3rd party tool for this specific problem …
XLS export is very new (and slow, as you’ve found out) and still has some quirks.
Just use the default CSV format, set the delimiter to semicolon and you can use the resulting files just as well with Excel (or OpenOffice, if you tell it that it’s in UTF-8 encoding).
