Clean up your Media Center Recorded TV folder with wmc-dedupe

Even in these days of multiple Terabytes hard drives we can still fill them up with recorded TV shows, problems with Media Center’s EPG data can lead to duplicates which can fill your Windows Media Center drives. A few years ago Garry wrote a small utility to remove duplicates and now there is a new app for Windows 7 from developer mrsilver.

The new app works with WTV and DVR-MS formats, it scans for duplicates and then moves them to a special folder for deleting. The tool is command line based so you can create a scheduled task to run it automatically or you can run it whenever you need.

The apps is free and you can find out all the details and download links on the developers site.

1. Highly configurable command line based program for running as a one off or as a scheduled task.
2. Looks at WTV or DVR-MS files (with extensions wtv, dvr-ms or dvrms).
3. Options to exclude examing WTV or DVR-MS files.
4. Can delete duplicate shows or move them into a user defined duplicates folder.
5. Only the larger duplicate recording is kept (meaning that HDTV or longer shows are prioritised)
6. Can delete shows from the duplicates folder after they are older than a certain number of days.
7. Test mode which doesn’t delete or move files.
8. Seven days worth of logs kept.
9. Three levels of logging, from minimal to very verbose.
10. Ability to pause after running to view the output.
11. Can use the “Public Recorded TV” path or any other location.
12. Automatically detects if a recording is occuring. Can be forced to ignore this if required.
13. Pre-loading of meta-data for fast duplicate matching over a slow connection (such as a network).
14. Duplicates identifed even if they have differing punctuation, capitalisation or accents.
15. Descriptions with brackets (either square or normal) are handled correctly when comparing files.
16. Common starting descriptions (e.g. “repeat”, “premier” or “new”) are handled when comparing files.
17. Descriptions where the sub-title has been incorrectly placed into the description are handled when comparing files.
18. Sanity checking to ensure that incorrect command line options don’t destroy your recorded TV.