A couple of basic questions from someone new to the whole world of HTPCs please!
I’m experimenting with set-up options, but i’m trying to use a pretty decent PC (core i7 2600k) connected to a WD NAS box to stream around the house (to smart TVs at the moment - hopefully physically connected via cat6 later).
I’m slightly confused by transcoding though. As the sound will only be using the speakers internal to the TVs, I assume that must be 2-channel stereo, So if I’ve ripped a TV series from a blu ray in say, DTS 5.1, does that mean it’s going to transcode every time I try to watch it? In this case, if I want to avoid transcoding, would I need to rip so the audio is in a basic 2-channel stereo format?
Also I’m a bit confused about both ripping and watching audio commentary tracks of TV series. I’m using MakeMKV and, having ticked alllllllllllllllllll the boxes to rip, i’ll get a bunch of audio track options to select, but a couple may say “English DTS 5.1” for example - so it’s a random pick if I get the right one or not.
So the question here is, is there a way to make this clearer, is this something i should be doing when I rip them or in Plex itself?
thanks for any help! (and I’m loving the whole HTPC / Plex experience so far by the way - slight confusion aside )
Hi there! Welcome to this exciting world that will probably take up a lot of time where you may or may not end up feeling like you spend more time preparing content for viewing than you do actually viewing the content.
As to your question about how to minimize the number of options for audio in order to avoid transcoding - you’re actually missing a step in the whole process. While Plex will happily play your files direct from MakeMKV - that may not benefit you in the long run. Essentially MakeMKV creates a simple container for your show and that container will hold all the video/audio/subtitle options you want. However, when you play that, Plex will have to sort through all those options to make sure your viewing device can properly deal with it.
Therefore, the missing step is actually to convert that mkv container into a file that has fewer options and is more easily viewable by as many devices as possible - limiting the requirement for Plex to transcode on demand. So I suggest using the free program called Handbrake (https://handbrake.fr/) to convert your mkv files after MakeMKV creates them.
Handbrake is notoriously difficult to deal with though so I find it best to follow some predefined settings to make sure you get exactly what you want. Just today I actually found this site: http://www.rokoding.com/index.html Its Roku oriented, but turning your mkv’s into high quality mp4’s will really be a benefit in the long run. Additionally, Handbrake’s settings will allow you to choose exactly which audio streams are attached to the file, what kind of quality those are (maybe you want to add basic stereo for your tv’s now, but have a 2nd 5.1 stream available) and whether or not you want to have subtitles. Additionally, you can keep the mp4’s almost lossless in terms of video quality for a large file size, but that’s all up to you.
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