01What Ultron is, and how to get around
Ultron connects to your Plex server and takes a snapshot of your whole library once a day — every film, every show, every episode, along with what's been watched and when. From that snapshot it does four things: flags content that's gone stale (unwatched and old — “rot”), holds anything you decide to clear out in a safe, reversible 90-day quarantine before it's ever actually deleted, suggests films worth upgrading to a better quality, and reports gaps in your collections and TV series using data from TMDB (a free online movie/TV database).
Importantly, nothing is automatic except the daily snapshot. Ultron never deletes anything on its own — it only ever suggests, and every quarantine, rescue or deletion is a deliberate click from you.
The sidebar is grouped into five sections: Overview (Command), Intelligence (Rot Detection, Upgrade Candidates), Operations (Quarantine), Discovery (Collection Gaps, Episode Gaps), and Analytics (Library Audit, Explore, Storage Analytics, Stats). There's no search bar or keyboard shortcuts yet — navigation is entirely by clicking through the sidebar, and every screen is one click away from any other.
Before Ultron can do anything, it needs to connect to your Plex server (a one-time setup card that appears on Command if it isn't connected yet), and separately to TMDB if you want Collection Gaps, Episode Gaps or the genre-mismatch checks on Library Audit.
Tip
Ultron doesn't currently show posters, ratings or a proper detail view for an individual title, and there's no “open in Plex” link — everything is presented as rows in tables and lists. It's a decision-making tool for the shape of your whole library, not a browsing app.
02Command — the home screen
Command gives you the state of your whole collection at a glance: a brief summary line, four headline tiles, and a table of library totals. There's a “Sync now” button if you want to force a fresh snapshot rather than waiting for the daily one.
The four tiles are: how much could be reclaimed if you cleared out everything currently flagged as rot, how much you've reclaimed in total over the app's lifetime, how many titles are currently in quarantine, and an overall “Collection Health” score blending rot, upgrade candidates and gaps into one number.
- The Quarantine tile only counts active items, not ones whose 90 days are up. Check the Quarantine screen itself if you want to know whether anything's waiting on you.
- “Last synced” reflects the last sync attempt, not necessarily the last successful one. If numbers elsewhere look oddly small or a screen won't load, running “Sync now” again is a reasonable first move.
- Collection Health is a blended score without much explanation — treat it as a rough temperature check, and use the individual screens for anything you want to act on.
Tip
Command is best used as an “is anything urgent” glance on your way to one of the more detailed screens — the real decisions happen on Rot Detection and Quarantine.
03Rot Detection — finding what to clear out
This is the heart of Ultron: a list of titles worth clearing out, alongside a “Protected” tab showing what's explicitly safe. Each row shows the title, library, when it was last watched (or “Never watched”), file size, and a rot score.
How something gets flagged: a title is flagged once it's older than a threshold you set (four years by default, adjustable in the header) — unless it's been watched twice or more, or you've personally rated it 9 or higher, in which case it's automatically protected regardless of age. You can also manually protect or unprotect any title yourself.
The rot score is a rough 0–100 blend of age, whether it's ever been watched, file size, and ratings — but it's the age threshold that actually decides whether something appears on the list, not the score. Don't read a lower score as “safer”.
- The list can get long — on a large library this can run into the hundreds or low thousands of rows, with no search beyond a Films/TV toggle. Worth working through it in batches.
- Quarantining a title from this list is a single click with no confirmation — unlike deletion, which has two confirmation steps. That's by design since quarantine is fully reversible.
- Titles imported a long time ago may show “never watched” even if that's not really accurate — worth a quick gut-check before quarantining anything that feels wrong.
Tip
Work Rot Detection in short, regular sessions rather than one big pass — since quarantine is reversible, it's a low-stakes screen to make quick calls on.
04Quarantine — the safety net before deleting anything
Quarantine is what makes Rot Detection low-risk: nothing is ever deleted straight away. When you quarantine a title, Ultron locks a label on it in Plex and starts a 90-day countdown. During those 90 days you or anyone in your household can still find and watch it — quarantine doesn't hide anything, it just marks it as “on notice.”
Rescuing a title removes it from quarantine and cancels the countdown — fully reversible, one click. One thing worth knowing: rescuing a title doesn't currently reset or protect it going forward, so it can reappear on the Rot Detection list later with the same score. If there's a title you want to keep permanently safe, explicitly protect it on the Rot Detection screen too.
Deleting only becomes available once a title's 90 days are up, and it's a genuinely deliberate two-step process, because this step really does delete the file from your server.
Before you delete
There's currently no way to exclude a single title from a “ready to delete” batch other than rescuing it first — review and rescue anything you've changed your mind about before confirming.
There's no dry-run or “move to a trash folder” option — confirming deletion is final and immediate. Check whether your NAS has its own recycle bin as a second safety net.
Watching a title during its 90-day quarantine doesn't automatically rescue it — worth periodically glancing at the active batch for recent activity you'd want to reconsider.
Tip
Think of quarantine as your real decision point, not Rot Detection — sending something to quarantine costs nothing and buys you three months to change your mind, so err on the side of quarantining generously.
05Upgrade Candidates, Collection Gaps and Episode Gaps
Upgrade Candidates is a simple shopping list: films you clearly love (watched several times, or highly rated) that are stored at a lower resolution than you'd probably want. It's movies-only for now — Ultron can't yet read resolution at the individual episode level for series.
Collection Gaps looks at your movie collections via TMDB and shows which entries you own and which you're missing, split into an “Acquire” tab and a “Watched” tab. Expand any collection to see the individual titles. The film-matching is automatic and occasionally imperfect — an obviously wrong grouping is a matching error, not anything wrong with your library.
Episode Gaps does the same for TV shows. The exact air date of a missing episode isn't shown, just season and episode number; and very recently aired episodes can show as “missing” even if they've simply not made it into your library yet.
Both Gaps screens need a one-time TMDB connection (a free API key) before they'll show anything.
Tip
Run a fresh sync on these two screens every so often rather than assuming they're current — the underlying TMDB data updates in the background but isn't refreshed automatically every time you open the app.
06Library Audit, Explore, Storage Analytics and Stats
These four screens are less about action and more about understanding your collection.
Library Audit runs hygiene checks across your library — missing artwork, genre mismatches, and other metadata issues — as a set of scannable tables. Good to check in on every so often.
Explore lets you browse by genre, actor or director, showing what you own and how much you've actually watched. Clicking an actor or director does a live TMDB lookup for what else they've done that you don't own — a nice way to find your next watch.
Storage Analytics breaks down space by resolution, “gigabytes per watch,” and duplicates. For titles with multiple versions or multi-part files, this screen currently only counts one part toward the total size, so true space used may run a bit higher than shown. TV shows appear as a single “Unknown resolution” bucket.
Stats is the light, fun screen — most-watched titles, breakdowns by decade and codec. One quirk: “most watched” currently reflects your own viewing only, not the whole household's combined history the way most other screens do.
Tip
These four are worth a slower look monthly rather than daily — they're where you'll spot patterns rather than day-to-day decisions.
07Tips and things to know for getting the most out of Ultron
A suggested rhythm for using Ultron day to day:
- Glance at Command occasionally to check nothing urgent is waiting.
- Work through Rot Detection in small batches, quarantining anything you're not attached to — it costs nothing.
- Check Quarantine periodically for anything that's reached its 90 days, review the batch, rescue anything you've changed your mind about, then confirm the rest.
- Dip into Upgrade Candidates, Collection Gaps and Episode Gaps when you're in a browsing mood.
- Use Library Audit, Explore, Storage Analytics and Stats as an occasional, slower check-in. - There's no settings screen yet. The rot age threshold is adjustable on the Rot Detection page, but the quarantine length and a few other behind-the-scenes settings aren't editable from within the app. - There's no search on any of the longer tables or lists — on a large library these can run to hundreds or thousands of rows. - Deletion is genuinely final. Worth checking your NAS's own backup or recycle-bin setup as a second layer of safety. - There's no notification when something's ready for a final decision — build a habit of checking Quarantine every couple of weeks. - Nothing here is time-sensitive the way Jarvis or Vision's numbers are — data refreshes once a day, no need to watch anything update live.
Ultron is under active development, so expect a few of these gaps — no settings screen, no search, no notifications — to get filled in over time. None of them put your library at risk in the meantime; they just mean a bit more manual checking-in than the finished version will need.