I say “large” because it’s probably crumbs to folks on here but I have roughly 2-3TB of movies and tv shows for my Plex server. Problem is, I have copies of mainly movies scattered between 3-4 computers and I’m finally setting up a dedicated server to consolidate everything. Once I have everything on a single computer, I want to be able to find duplicate movies and shows and keep the higher quality ones. I guess the simplest way would be to toss everything into the same folder and when Windows notifies me of a duplicate, I would just keep which ever file size is bigger which would assume higher quality. I’m hoping to find an application that lets me export video metadata so I can see sizes, bitrate, and resolution so I can 1. delete low quality version then 2. see which of my favorite movies/shows are of low quality so I can eventually get higher quality replacements.
I came across MediaInfo but can’t tell if it only lets you view video data individually or if it can do a mass export to a csv or something of the like.
I am not really sure if your strategy is the best one. How many movies do you actually have. 3TB can be ~3,000 ones in low quality or ~50 4K remuxes. for a few dozen movies and a handful of duplicates, your solution is overblown.
What I would do:
- Copy each of your drives onto your new main drive. Keep them in separate folders that are named in a way to indicate where they came from. File sorting tends to be messy and mistake prone so do not delete the originals right away.
- Make sure your naming is correct. Plex works only great if you stick to the naming conventions. Using a tool like tinyMediaManager or filebot can help you a lot in this regard.
- Now it’s time to check for duplicates. I somewhat doubt that the issue is so big that it is really worth it to automate this. Yes, MediaInfo is a great tool for this although you should look up a bit how to actually interpret what the program says. There is some correlation between file size and quality but a lower bitrate reencode with a more modern codec or a slower encode can look better than a high bitrate, old one. And you might care about stuff like 5.1 sound, subtitles, non dubbed etc
- Setup a program like overseer. This makes managing your library easier
- Now you can check your stuff for quality and missing features and note down your issues in overseer to deal with them later. It is not possible to automatically determine if an encode is low quality or not in many cases. When CRF was it can be done to some degree but for bitrate encodes it is kinda of impossible. It also depends a lot on your preferences what can be considered “good”. I like to keep the film grain or noise, others actively avoid it. As noise cannot be compressed well it tends to blow files significantly though