Security Camera Videos Library Issue

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#: 1.18.8.2527
Player Version#: N/A
I am running a PLEX server on a Raspberry Pi 3+ and storing all video files on a mounted external USB drive. As long as i don’t require transcoding, this setup works great. I also have several security cameras that upload automatically to the external drive and are displayed in a PLEX library. This has worked great since Aug last year until recently when the metadata folder filled up my Pi SD card and locked everything up. To be clear, that was over 24,000 videos from the cameras alone so I wasn’t surprised. Since then, I’ve removed the metadata and reconfigured PLEX so that the camera library is no longer displayed.

My question is there any way to limit the number of videos displayed in a folder by PLEX so that it’s only the last 200 or so displayed and that the metadata folder won’t grow so large. Maybe a FIFO configuration that would only look at the last 200 or maybe the last month of videos? I’ve already tried to move the library files (metadata, thumbnails, logs, etc.) to that storage drive but haven’t had success because the drive is NTFS and the linux commands to change ownership don’t work.

I realize that PLEX is a media manager not designed to curate a huge folder of security videos but it’s been my experience that it is amazingly flexible in many ways so I thought this might be possible. Thanks.

A_Centaur

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No, Plex cannot do that.
You may want to make your upload script smarter, so it e.g. moves older files into a different folder, which is not “seen” by Plex.

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Thanks for your reply. I will try a different route. I’m sure there’s a way to have software on the Pi move the files automatically. There are no scripts involved for uploads. The cameras just upload directly to a folder via ftp on my Pi. Any motion detection recordings get uploaded immediately so that if someone rips the camera down to get at the internal sd card, I’ll still have the video. It’s really a pretty sweet setup. I figured that since I had the PLEX server set up anyway, it would be nice to access the videos remotely when on vacation etc.

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Since the Pi is running Linux, I imagine you can do this with e.g. a Bash script and cron. But please don’t ask me for specifics, I am no Linux guy.

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