I am using an HD HomeRun Extend & the Plex DVR with pretty good results. I started out using the HD HomeRun’s built-in feature to transcode to h.264, but in practice, this is kind of a bust. The quality takes a pretty significant hit, I assume because it’s got to do it in realitime and it’s not an especially powerful GPU. And there’s not really a huge space savings either, it cuts the size down by only to about 65-75% of the original. If I do my own encoding to h.264 using Handbrake, it’s more like 20% of the original size with far better quality. (h.265 even better). So I’ve switched to just using native format, but this of course takes up way more space than such content should in this day and age.
So the question is, why can’t Plex do this for us automatically on a schedule? It’s already got an excellent infrastructure for transcoding content for streaming, etc.
What would be awesome is if I can record content in native MPEG2 format as it airs, and then just queue it all to be transcoded to some more efficient format (not in real time) using the same options we already have for transcoding content for streaming or downloading.
The goal here is saving space; I tend to be a hoarder and I will accumulate all kinds of stuff. I can just do it by hand using Handbrake once in a while, but this seems silly since Plex already has this capability built in with other features.
Plex does provide a Post Processing option to allow users to do whatever they would like with their recordings after the recording finishes. It before it is moved to the library. This would allow you to automate the conversion process. Handbrake does have a CLI tool that could be used to process your file using a preset you already have setup. I use mcebuddy since I am running on Windows. Mcebuddy removes commercials and converts the recording to a MP4 format for me. All of this is done within 3-11 minutes based on length of recording and resolution. If you are really wanting to conserve as much space as possible you should look at HEVC or h265 which will save you even more space than h264. Over my converted files by mcebuddy that are in h264 format I am seeing an additional 45-65% decrease in file size with h265. This would be contingent on your clients supporting h265.
@johnm_ColaSC said:
Plex does provide a Post Processing option…
Ah, I see that now. Would be better if it was not “before it was moved to the library” since that could take a long time, esp. if there was a queue, but I could live with that. It just seems like a no brainer to have something a little more user-friendly, since Plex has all this capability built in already. I’m all in with h.265 for my own media so I would definitely do that, I just figured since Plex only uses 264 for it’s own stuff that would be what we were looking at.
The only concern I have is that my Plex server already runs pretty much full time encoding crap in h.265 at high quality, it takes about 8 hours to encode a 2 hour movie. If I stuck that into my DVR pipeline it would take forever for them to get added to my library, and recordings from TV I care about a lot more than all the other backround stuff.
An alternative might be to just set up an out-of-band batch job on another computer to watch the file system for new recordings and encode them with the same tooling you’re recommending…
Thanks for the suggestions, though, at least there are some good options. I haven’t heard of mcebuddy before either and looking forward to checking that out.
I am doing my h265 conversions outside of Plex Post Processing. My mcebuddy conversion which does comskip for commercial removal and ffmpeg for the mpegts to MP4 conversion like I said takes 3-11 minutes to process recordings and put them in my library.
I think the point was that comskip + remuxing to MP4 is done during Plex postprocessing, in 3-11 minutes, so that the recordings quickly end up in the library. Then the H.265 conversion is done later.
