serverAppConfigs/serverAppConfigs-docs/Dankserver/Media Relayout.md

type, title, description, tags, timestamp

type	title	description	tags	timestamp
reference	Media Relayout	Census, plan and apply the movie library into Jellyfin format, and move TV out of it: the gates, refusals, rollback.	dankserver media-server jellyfin plex procedure	2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Media Relayout

The movie library on Entropy Volume arrived as release folders — Some.Movie.2019.1080p.WiKiTaLx.x265-FOO/ with the video inside named after the release. Jellyfin matches a movie by folder and file name, so the release noise cost posters, extras and versions. These scripts turn that library into Jellyfin's own shape — and move TV back out of it — and nothing else in the repo touches a media file.

Script	Touches media?	Output
scripts/media-census.py	reads headers only	enum, probed, plex TSVs
scripts/media-plan.py	no — TSVs in, TSVs out	the plan + the exception report
scripts/media-apply.py	renames, never copies; sweeps only what a run emptied	the moves, plus a journal
scripts/media-tv.py	no — TSV out	a plan that moves TV into the TV library

The seam is tests/media_relayout.bats; the target contract is quoted from jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies in media-plan.py's docstring.

Procedure

Run the census on the machine that mounts the library. probe is the slow step (a header read per container) and is niced — it is safe beside a live service because it never competes for the GPU and never writes inside the library.

C=scripts/media-census.py
$C enumerate --root /mnt/entropy/Movies --out /tmp/media-enum.tsv
$C probe     --enum /tmp/media-enum.tsv --out /tmp/media-probed.tsv --jobs 6
$C plex      --root /mnt/entropy/Movies --out /tmp/plex-movies.tsv

plex reads the Plex metadata cache (--db defaults to the path the Plex container bind-mounts at /var/lib/plexmediaserver) with mode=ro&immutable=1: a live server is never locked or written.

Then plan — this reads only the three TSVs, so it costs seconds and can run anywhere, including a laptop:

scripts/media-plan.py --root /mnt/entropy/Movies \
    --enum /tmp/media-enum.tsv --probed /tmp/media-probed.tsv \
    --plex /tmp/plex-movies.tsv --out /tmp/jf-plan.tsv --exceptions /tmp/jf-exceptions.txt

Read /tmp/jf-exceptions.txt before applying. It is not a log: every line is a file the plan could not name a film for, a pile that needs a README, or a collision it refused. The printed gate lines are the go/no-go: problems, bad-names, occupied, double-claim, left-unmoved must all be 0 and unplanned=0 must appear in the report. Any non-zero number means a file that would be filed wrong, and the plan is not run until it is understood.

scripts/media-apply.py apply    --plan /tmp/jf-plan.tsv --root /mnt/entropy/Movies   # dry, writes nothing
scripts/media-apply.py apply    --plan /tmp/jf-plan.tsv --root /mnt/entropy/Movies --apply
scripts/media-apply.py verify   --plan /tmp/jf-plan.tsv --journal /mnt/entropy/media-relayout.jsonl
scripts/media-apply.py sweep    --journal /mnt/entropy/media-relayout.jsonl --root /mnt/entropy/Movies   # dry
scripts/media-apply.py sweep    --journal /mnt/entropy/media-relayout.jsonl --root /mnt/entropy/Movies --apply
scripts/media-apply.py rollback --journal /mnt/entropy/media-relayout.jsonl --root /mnt/entropy/Movies --apply

An apply also leaves the release folders it emptied standing where they were — hundreds of them at the library root — which is what sweep removes, dry-run first, from the same journal.

After it lands, both servers need a scan or the change is invisible.

# Run this from the host shell through `podman exec`, never from a neighbour
# container: Plex's HTTPD closes without a single byte on any request that
# arrives from another container's netns (10.89.x.x reads as "empty reply", not
# as a 401). The token rides stdin, never argv, where any process on the host
# could read it out of /proc/<pid>/cmdline.
umask 077
podman exec plex sh -c "sed -n 's/.*PlexOnlineToken=\"\\([^\"]*\\)\".*/\\1/p' \
  '/config/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Preferences.xml'" >/tmp/px.tok
podman exec -i plex sh -c 'read -r T
  for k in $(curl -s -H "X-Plex-Token: $T" -H "Accept: application/json" \
      http://127.0.0.1:32400/library/sections | grep -o "\"key\":\"[0-9]*\"" | cut -d\" -f4); do
    curl -s -o /dev/null -w "plex section $k: %{http_code}\n" -X POST \
      -H "X-Plex-Token: $T" "http://127.0.0.1:32400/library/sections/$k/refresh"
  done' </tmp/px.tok

Jellyfin's scan key lives in ~/.config/secrets/jellyfin (mode 600; the same value is JELLYFIN_API_KEY in the ignored dankserver/.env). It rides a mode-600 curl config, never a header argument, and it must use the MediaBrowser form — Jellyfin 12.4 refuses a bare X-Emby-Token for any key:

umask 077
{ printf 'header = "Authorization: MediaBrowser Token=\\"%s\\""\n' \
    "$(cat ~/.config/secrets/jellyfin)"
  echo 'url = "http://127.0.0.1:8096/Library/Refresh"'
  echo 'request = "POST"'; } >/tmp/jf.hdr
curl -s -K /tmp/jf.hdr -o /dev/null -w "jellyfin scan: %{http_code}\n"
shred -u /tmp/jf.hdr

204 is acceptance; the scan then runs on the server's own schedule.

TV in the movie library

A box set that arrives in the movie share stays there until someone moves it: media-plan.py refuses to file TV and parks each series in _TV needs a TV library - <series>. scripts/media-tv.py is the mover. It walks the movie library itself (no census needed), groups episode-shaped names by series, and writes a plan in the executor's own format:

scripts/media-tv.py --root /mnt/entropy/Movies --library /mnt/entropy/TVShows \
    --out /mnt/entropy/media-tv-plan.tsv
scripts/media-apply.py apply --plan /mnt/entropy/media-tv-plan.tsv --root /mnt/entropy
scripts/media-apply.py apply --plan /mnt/entropy/media-tv-plan.tsv --root /mnt/entropy \
    --journal /mnt/entropy/media-relayout-tv.jsonl --apply
scripts/media-apply.py sweep --journal /mnt/entropy/media-relayout-tv.jsonl \
    --root /mnt/entropy --apply

The shape it writes is the one both matchers read — Monk (2002)/Season 05/ Monk - S05E03 - Mr. Monk and the Big Game.mkv — keeping the file's own name, because the publisher's spelling beats a re-derivation, with the year taken from the box-set folder. What it refuses it prints and leaves alone:

• fewer than --min (5) files under one series name: one file named Part 2 is a film, not a series;
• an episode whose name states no season number — no invented Season 01;
• a destination two files both claim: the executor refuses the whole plan before its first rename, and only Frank decides which copy is the keeper.
• an episode the destination library already holds at the same byte count. The movie share carried a second copy of the whole Monk box set — 124 episodes both sides, the same episode list, every byte count identical, 31.5 GiB each way, and head+tail blake2b identical on a 6-episode sample. The mover leaves such a series in place and says so; a duplicate is deleted or kept by Frank, never copied into one library by a tool.

A sidecar that shares an episode's own name (.srt, .nfo) moves with it.

Below the threshold the mover prints and leaves, so a lone downloaded episode of a real show stays in the movie library on purpose — six did on 2026-10-30. Filing one by hand is the same executor on a hand-written plan and the same journal; the trap is the series year. Read it from the file's own name or the folder it owns, never from the title whose bonus folder it happens to be parked in — The Cleveland Show S03E07 inside Die Hard (1988)/extras/ is not a 1988 show. A name whose marker is Part 2 is a film and stays put.

Laws

• A moved file is a 404 in Plex until its section is rescanned. The database keeps the release-folder path, so playback fails Couldn't find the file to stream while the scanner works through the section. Never read such a 404 as a lost file: the file is where the journal says it is.
• Plex's matched title outranks the filename, and a Plex year of 0 means indexed but never matched — trusting it named folders Title (0), which is a Jellyfin item with no year, no poster and no identity. A year that is not a plausible year is no information.
• <>:"/\|?* never survive a name. Plex's own title for V/H/S/2 is V/H/S/2; kept verbatim it became Movies/V/H/S/2 (2013)/ — a tree five levels deep that neither matcher reads as a movie.
• A folder inside a movie's folder is bonus territory even when its name is misspelled. Saboteur (1942)/Exrtas/Saboteur - A Closer Look is a typo for Extras; the vocabulary rule never fired, the featurette became a movie folder, and its words then out-scored the real film and drew that box set's other extras into it. The rule that replaced it needs no metadata: the folder holding the longest film owns the shorter video filed under it, unless that file's own name carries a different year — which is another film speaking.
• Matching words are split on everything that is not a letter or a digit. Splitting on separators but not on / left tokens like (1960)/extras that no other name could ever agree with, so a film could not be found by the folder holding it, and extras drifted into a neighbour. A bare number counts only when it could be a release year, so 1080 and 2160 never pose as agreement between two names.
• Compare two media libraries with the series engine, never a path substring. Filtering paths for monk also returns Monkey Dust, and letting whichever file a walk happens to reach first stand for an episode paired two libraries into a fake duplicate — the same sloppiness pointed the other way deletes a file that is unique. The comparison is media-titles.ep_of on both sides: series, season, episode, bytes, and a hash before anything is trashed.
• A deletion is staged on the item's own filesystem. The trash rule names ~/.AGENTTRASH, but /home and /mnt/entropy are different devices: a 31 GiB stage there is a copy rather than a rename, it has to fit in the 187 GiB of free space, and rename(2) refuses it anyway. Trash goes beside the item — /mnt/entropy/.AGENTTRASH/<date>-<topic>/ — so it costs one inode change and rolls back exactly like the move that made it.
• A Jellyfin 401 is the header, not the key. 12.4 authenticates only Authorization: MediaBrowser Token="…" and refuses a bare X-Emby-Token for every key, valid or not. This page carried "no credential on this box can trigger a scan, the two Seerr keys answer 401" for weeks because of that header — the keys were innocent. Before believing a 401, prove the key against the server's own table: select count(*) from ApiKeys where AccessToken = ? on jellyfin.db opened mode=ro&immutable=1.
• A scan that must see a new folder has to be recursive. POST /Library/Refresh is the incremental pass, and inotify does not cross a rootless podman bind, so folders created on the host stay invisible to it. The move is POST /Items/{id}/Refresh?Recursive=true (204) per library, the id from GET /Library/VirtualFolders — its field is ItemId, not Id — and that same record's RefreshStatus is the progress read.
• A file whose name carries no words is bonus material, not a folder. .Extra 1 ( 1H 27min multisub ).mkv parses to 1; a movie folder named 1 is not a movie. It becomes a review line telling a human to name the file.
• The executor renames and nothing else. rename(2) cannot cross a filesystem, so a plan that would is refused rather than silently copying tens of terabytes.
• The journal is a write-ahead log: the intent is fsynced before the rename. An interrupted run therefore leaves only two states — an intent whose move happened, and an intent whose move never ran — and the next run finishes the job without moving anything twice. A file that moved with no journal line did not move through this tool, and the tool refuses to guess on its behalf.
• The journal lives BESIDE the library root, never inside it (default: media-relayout.jsonl next to the root): a log inside the library is a file Jellyfin indexes.
• Refusals are all-or-nothing. An occupied target, a vanished source or a duplicate destination stops the run before the first rename, so the operator fixes one thing and re-runs instead of untangling a half-applied plan. --force relaxes only the opinion guards; it never permits overwriting.
• A sweep deletes only what the journal proves the run emptied. A folder is eligible when a journalled file moved out of it or out of something under it, it now holds nothing but empty directories, no journalled destination lives beneath it, and it is not a folder the run created. A folder nobody moved — someone's placeholder — cannot be selected at all, and a symlink anywhere inside disqualifies the subtree, because the thing behind a link is not this tool's to delete. Every removal is journalled as rmdir and rollback recreates the folder, so the sweep is undone by the same command as the moves. Proof carries downward: inside a folder the journal proves emptied, every empty directory goes with it. A release's Screens/ or Sample/ is never a move source itself, so 146 of them held their emptied parents on disk after the first sweep. A failed rmdir is not a removal: only a folder that is really gone leaves scope, so the next sweep finishes what a permission problem stopped.
• An episode-shaped name marks a SERIES, not a film — and the series is the name BEFORE the marker. Monk - S05E03 - Mr. Monk and the Big Game is series Monk. Keyed on the whole title instead, every episode became a group of one and never reached the five-episode size that calls something a series, so a box set was filed as 124 movies in 124 folders. The threshold still earns its keep: a lone film named Part 2 stays a film. Episodes of a series are parked in _TV needs a TV library - <series> for a human to move to a TV source — the movie tool never files TV.
• One journal is one undo. The TV move runs on its own journal, and with --root set to the share that holds BOTH libraries: the executor refuses any path outside --root, and a journal shared with the movie relayout would undo both runs when only one of them is wanted.

Rollback

One command, from the journal of the run: media-apply.py rollback --journal …/media-relayout.jsonl --apply. It recreates any folder a sweep removed, restores every source path, removes only the folders that run created and that are now empty, and refuses everything if any moved file cannot be accounted for. A rolled-back journal refuses to roll back twice.

See Also

Jellyfin, Plex, Entropy Volume, Testing Policy, Storage Policy

Citations

• Jellyfin Movie documentation — folder/file naming, extras subfolders, Movie (2013) - 216p.mkv version and - 4K.mkv handling: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies