FR: Add a setting to retain "X" number of episodes

[jeffphilly]

This is such an amazing app.

I have a use case where it would be ideal to save a certain number of episodes or episodes newer then X days.

While I can do this in plex, it is not very granular and would be great to handle it on the pinchflat end.

I have multiple channels where I prefer to watch via local but I dont need to keep all of the old, outdated episodes.

It would also be great if we can flag certain episodes to keep forever (it would override this rule for certain episodes).

Thanks for considering

[kieraneglin]

Hey there! Thanks for the report (:

There's already some discussion about this going on in #113, but I'm coming around to this as a feature I'll add sooner than later because so many people have asked for it.

If I added a feature like this, I would only add one or the other - not both. If you had to pick one between keep for X days and keep X downloaded items, which would you prefer? And if possible, could you explain why you prefer one or the other?

I can see the appeal for both - going by days works better for channels that frequently upload, but going by count works better for channels that rarely upload.

But now that I say it, I guess if they rarely upload then they don't take up as much storage space anyway. I would guess most people want something like this so the content doesn't take up too much storage which is really only an issue with channels that upload frequently. Sorry, just working through it out loud!

Anyway, let me know what you think! I still have a few other things I would need to get to before this but it's definitely higher on my priority list than it used to be

[jeffphilly]

So heres my thoughts on the matter...also just thinking out loud.

Both options would be better. Im sure you have reasons, but just want to throw that out there.

Plex has a setting to "keep": ( I dont see any comparable option in Jellyfin, but I could be wrong)

• latest
• 3 latest
• 5 latest
• episodes added in last 3 days
• episodes added in last 7 days
• episodes added in last 30 days

Now, for me, none of these are ideal and keeping last 30 days does fulfill most (although having more options such as 60 days,90 days,180 days or ideally X days would be much better) of my use cases that made me start thinking about this. For me, sports related content, news related content etc... On the other hand, keeping the latest 1,3 or 5 episodes is essentially useless for me (and I would have to imagine for most people running a local media server). This would only really be useful for storage maintenance and only keeping X number of episodes to keep storage use down.

So, in the end, I think X number of days would be better, both would be ideal and having the ability to exclude certain episodes from these rules would be a great way to use this feature without losing special episodes you want to keep forever.

[jeffphilly]

Adding 1 more piece of info. It does look like maintainerr can delete media in a show which is older then X days. So there is a potential work around...but I would still much prefer to keep it in the pinchflat app.

[onedr0p]

not both. If you had to pick one between keep for X days and keep X downloaded items

IMO if users had both of these knobs to turn per channel that would be ideal. A global option that could be overridden at the channel level would be nice too!

[kieraneglin]

IMO if users had both of these knobs to turn per channel that would be ideal

This is another one of those things where picking one is beneficial because I am but one man. I'm trying to be a little prescriptive about features because minimizing my maintenance burden is one of those things that pays compounding dividends.

There's also the hidden gotcha that the last x videos approach wouldn't work with the way I'm proactively downloading media during the index step since media isn't guaranteed to be indexed in the order it was uploaded. It's not to say it's an impossible problem, but it would greatly slow down the whole procedure which I would prefer to avoid

[jeffphilly]

Yea I figured you had reasons!

Also. the more I think about this. I really believe that the reason for only saving certain videos (other than storage space) is that those videos can become outdated and/or irrelevant. For me, the ability to save channels for X amount of time, with the ability to exclude certain videos from deletion, would cover the use cases that I was thinking about when I made the FR.

[kieraneglin]

Deletion after x days will be coming out in v0.1.7 which should be released later today 🎉 (docs)

This also includes the ability to exclude certain media from deletion!

edit: v0.1.7 is pushed!