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[RoderickGI]

Some of you may have noticed that sometimes MC "loses track" of some TV recording files in a directory it creates during recordings. Typically these are Time Shifting files, which are created whether you use JTV or TS format TV recordings. All Time Shifting files are created in JTV format, even if you use TS format TV recordings, the JTV files are created in parallel. Sometimes other files, components of actual recordings, get left behind as well.

There is an automatic process to remove these files, but occasionally that process doesn't work completely, or hasn't in the past. Many of the causes for this have been fixed in the last year or two.

If, like me, you have been going through your TV recording directory every now and then to clear some space for new recordings, finding these orphaned files and deleting the manually using Windows Explorer, now there is a much better way.

Go to "Tools > Options > Television > Advanced" and click on "Cleanup time-shifting folders". The process will look through your recording directory and sub-directories, and find any problem files, one set at a time. You will then be given the option to delete the files, or not. As finding the files is the hardest part of manually cleaning up the files, this is a great help. I still check using Windows Explorer to see if another program is in the problem sub-directory (if there is another JTV file in there, with a different name), just in case, but so far the tool has found real problems, and with one click they are removed. Brilliant!

What a great, and slightly secret tool, because nobody really told us about it, or explained how it was used. Now I have. Enjoy.

[Yaobing]

Thanks for posting this.

I wondered why nobody reacted when I first introduced this tool 

[RoderickGI]

You're welcome Yaobing, and thank you for the tool.

I do remember seeing it when it was first released, and thinking it could be great. But then life got in the way, and I forgot all about it. Hopefully now many people will discover and use it. 

[Castius]

Same here. I just used it and it cleanup a bunch of files. Thanks!

[RoderickGI]

I have just been cleaning up a bunch of TV recordings, moving them to suitable sub-directories and so on. I noticed that there were a few Time Shift folders left over, so I ran the "Cleanup time-shifting folders" tool, but it didn't remove them.

The image below shows an example. I'm afraid I didn't take note if this was a directly that previously also had a recording in it, so I don't know the history of these Time Shift files. I did expect the "Cleanup time-shifting folders" tool to remove it though, as it has removed similar stuff in the past.

Any ideas?

[Yaobing]

It looks like a complete set of files (for saved time-shifting).  So these are not considered orphaned files.  If you import the jtv file, will it play?  Then delete from inside MC.

[RoderickGI]

It plays but crashes before completing.

It won't import, but that may be because it is only 80MB in size.

I suspect it is left over Time Shifting files from when I killed a MC session when a recording was in process.

I thought the automatic cleanup process would clean that up, and if not, the manual process.

I'll just delete it and move on.

[Yaobing]

* - saved time-shifting.jtv files are created in case of a crash (or when MC is killed without having TV stopped).  We always assume that the user may have some use for them.  That is why we do not clean them up.

[RoderickGI]

Okay. Thanks Yaobing. Good to know. I don't think all the stuff I found was from me killing MC, but I have already deleted the rest so I will just keep an eye on it.