Both units are installed and running, 10 of 119 channels approved, 251 episodes
live in Jellyfin with verified DirectPlay. 345 tests. Six problems surfaced that no
test could have, and two of them were mine in the deploy scripts.
deploy.sh had a circular dependency with bootstrap.sh: deploy started the units and
told the operator to run bootstrap, but bootstrap refused to run until the state
directory existed, which only deploy creates. The units started against a
non-existent venv, failed 203/EXEC and restart-looped 17 and 21 times. deploy.sh now
creates the directory, calls bootstrap itself through runuser so the venv is not left
root-owned, and refuses to start units when the venv is still missing.
Deno was absent, and `doctor` is the only reason we know. It is mandatory rather than
nice-to-have — without a JS runtime yt-dlp cannot solve the n challenge, which
youtube-automate measured on this machine as 22 formats instead of 29 plus
throttling. Nothing else would have complained; playback would just have quietly
degraded. bootstrap.sh now installs it and asserts yt-dlp reports it.
Episodes had no synopsis at all, because materialise passed plot=None while both
sources hand us descriptions for free. Now plumbed through from RSS
(media:group/media:description) and from videos.list, which carries
snippet.description in the call already being made for durations — so the ~40% of
episodes older than RSS reaches get one too. That needed a schema v2 migration; v1
was left exactly as shipped so a fresh install and a migrated one are identical, and
a test asserts it.
`materialise --all` — the documented recovery from a Jellyfin metadata wipe — was
itself creating duplicates. Episode numbers were re-derived each run, and
next_episode() excludes the row being numbered, so re-materialising a day's videos in
a different order renumbered them and orphaned the old files. One run left 102
orphaned NFOs against 251 episodes. An episode number is now permanent once assigned,
and a video whose rel_path changes has its old files removed first. Running it twice
is now a no-op.
Two Jellyfin behaviours worth having in writing. It ignores <runtime> and
<durationinseconds> for episodes while reading the rest of the NFO happily, so a
.strm shows no duration until first played — not fixable without probing, which is
the one thing this design exists to avoid. And a plain /Library/Refresh does not
reliably re-read a rewritten NFO: after rewriting all 251, fifty kept their old empty
metadata. The fix is metadataRefreshMode=Default with replaceAllMetadata=false, which
took plots from 201 to 251 while the proxy served zero requests. §5's prohibition on
replaceAllMetadata=true still stands — that one probes. Exposed as
`ytstream refresh-metadata` and run automatically after `materialise --all`.
The measurement §5 has been waiting for: a full Jellyfin scan of 251 .strm files
took ~119 s, about 8 minutes per 1,000 episodes, and made zero media probes. That
last number is the fact the whole design rests on, now confirmed at scale on the real
library rather than on seven PoC files.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
