[mythtv-users] Orphan recordings cleaned up?

[Harry Coin]

On Fri, 17 Dec 2010 14:51:06 -0500 Joseph Fry<joe at thefrys.com>  wrote:

>> 1. A show is recorded by, and stored on, a slave backend properly.
>> >
>> >  2. Sometime later, a frontend notes 'that recording is missing'.  Maybe
>> >  because the slave -be is down, the nfs share had an issue, whatnot.  So, the
>> >  front end user, unaware of technical detail, deletes the listing because
>> >  they think it's just screen clutter.
>> >
>> >  3.  When the slave 'comes back' or otherwise the recording access issue is
>> >  fixed-- what happens?
>> >
>> >  You then have an orphaned recording.
> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Myth.rebuilddatabase.pl  used to add these
> orphaned recordings back into the database, but not anymore... your best bet
> is just to add them in mythvideo.
>
> I have often wished that a recording's metadata was stored along side the
> recording in an XML file of the same name in addition to or in lieu of the
> database... this would allow movement of recordings between MythTV systems,
> offline storage of recordings, and of course more resiliant recovery in
> situdations as you describe.

Ok.  What's the procedure to determine which recording files in any 
given directory holding recordings are not in the database?

I need an 'Orphan Recording Identification' procedure.   Once I have 
that, the idea of keeping the ones we like as videos makes sense.

I just suspect there is a whole lot of space being taken up by what 
looks like totally normal recordings when listing a directory manually. 
  How can I know which are the ones that just waste space as myth has 
long since forgotten about them, won't delete them, won't show them. 
I want to delay buying bigger disks for no reason!

Thanks
Harry