Media recorded from a tuner will be in the same format it is broadcast in, which for SD content usually means MPEG2, which (a) is space-inefficient and (b) is not supported by most browsers.
I have had excellent results with manually converting such media after recording using the “Optimize” feature. It would be ideal if this could be done automatically.
I am aware that there are currently two ways to achieve this:
- You can enable the setting to transcode during recording, however, this may be problematic on less powerful hardware, or with many simultaneous recordings
- You can choose a custom script to run after each recording, but this requires a high-level of technical ability (i.e., crafting a suitable ffmpeg command). It also means you do not have visibility of the conversion in the Plex dashboard, and you cannot use Plex’s conversion profiles (e.g. Optimized for Mobile or Optimized for TV)
This has been requested before, and closed (about 4 years ago) in favour of the above options, however, I’d suggest that the above represents an MVP of the feature, and it’s time we had something more polished.
Proposal:
Add an option to the “DVR Settings” to convert recorded programmes after they finish.
This should reuse the functionality of the “Optimize…” feature:
Ideally, it should be possible to (a) override the global settings per-recording and (b) have different settings for HD and SD content (HD TV is generally in MPEG4 format, which is already widely supported, and may not require conversion.)
