Upcoming Core Changes - Bytesized Hosting

Edit: This is now the default for new Deluge & Plex installations.

One of the challenges of the new stack is making sure Plex recognises any files you throw at it. Sadly this is not always the case. Luckily a fellow alpha testers, beeblebrox, recommended we take a look at FileBot.

After doing some initial research it seems that FileBot might be a good fit for what we are trying to do. That’s why over the weekend new installations of Plex and Deluge will come with FileBot setup. Let me take a minute to explain what this will do for you and why you want this.

The workflow will be similar to what you are doing now, you will label your downloads based on the content, Movies or Tv (and in the near future Anime). When a download is finished Deluge will tell Filebot to work it’s magic on the download, FileBot will do try to achieve the following things.

• It will check if the content is compressed and try to uncompress it if that’s the case. Plex can’t read rarred files for instance so this is one step in the right direction.
• Next it will try to find the content on one of the known databases thetvdb.com, themoviedb.org etc.
• Based on what it finds FileBot will now create a hardlink to the file in ~/media and rename it in such a way that Plex is likely to identify the content correctly. For instance Friends.S06E03.mkv will be moved and renamed to ~/media/TV Shows/Friends/Seasons 06/Friends.S06E03.mkv or similar.

Now there are two small gotcha’s because FileBot is creating a hardlink.

• Plex doesn’t recognise that new content is being added to it’s library. Technically a hardlink is not a new file so it won’t try to refresh. To counter this I will setup Plex to rescan everything on a 10 minute interval. (or you can manual refresh if you require it)
• Because of the hardlink if you delete your files from Deluge the version that is in ~/media will still be there. So you will also have to delete that version via Pydio, FTP or SSH.

I will probably release this version of the new apps over the weekend. When this happens the workflow changes away from LabelPlus back to normal Deluge labels. I will keep the LabelPlus plugin installed and you can set it up to behave as it’s doing now if you prefer not to use FileBot.

I will update this post once the new versions are online and you can test them.

Happy testing :)