Hi Collisionic, the file is 3GB not sure how to make it available to you.
I haven’t set it up for sickbeard or anything like that. I downloaded Convert 2.2.zip then followed the instructions in the instruction.txt file included in the convert folder.
@Grantp said:
Hi Collisionic, the file is 3GB not sure how to make it available to you.
I haven’t set it up for sickbeard or anything like that. I downloaded Convert 2.2.zip then followed the instructions in the instruction.txt file included in the convert folder.
Google Drive. Or share your Plex library to him for a few days, he’ll have the option to download the file in the web interface.
Thanks KarlDag, I have PM’ed Collisionic with a Plex account where he can access the files in question.
@Grantp said:
Thanks KarlDag, I have PM’ed Collisionic with a Plex account where he can access the files in question.
Both audio tracks aren’t english, so the english audio track is mislabeled.
With the subtitles – the problem is that .mp4 files are not compatible with the subtitle codec being used, dvb_subtitle. They are a picture subtitle and .mp4 only works with external srt/vtt/ass files and internal mov_text subtitles – which are all text-based subtitles.
I think MKVToolNix Downloads – Matroska tools for Linux/Unix and Windows can handle dvb_subtitle, so maybe you can convert the file from .ts to .mkv, but I haven’t played around with that.
I’ve added a pull request here - Fix detection of forced/default subtitles. by Collisionc · Pull Request #762 · mdhiggins/sickbeard_mp4_automator · GitHub - that will fix the empty .srt file from showing up. Cayar’s script is based on sickbeard’s mp4 automator.
You can overlay picture based subtitles and burn them into the video stream. I’ve got a working fork of the mp4 automator that automatically burns in forced subtitles, and just added in some code that would burn in the users preferred language subtitles if there is no audio track that matches it. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t work with your files because they have audio streams that are not labeled correctly, but if they were, it would automatically burn in english subtitles.
@Collisionc said:
@Grantp said:
Thanks KarlDag, I have PM’ed Collisionic with a Plex account where he can access the files in question.Both audio tracks aren’t english, so the english audio track is mislabeled.
With the subtitles – the problem is that .mp4 files are not compatible with the subtitle codec being used, dvb_subtitle. They are a picture subtitle and .mp4 only works with external srt/vtt/ass files and internal mov_text subtitles – which are all text-based subtitles.
I think MKVToolNix Downloads – Matroska tools for Linux/Unix and Windows can handle dvb_subtitle, so maybe you can convert the file from .ts to .mkv, but I haven’t played around with that.
I’ve added a pull request here - Fix detection of forced/default subtitles. by Collisionc · Pull Request #762 · mdhiggins/sickbeard_mp4_automator · GitHub - that will fix the empty .srt file from showing up. Cayar’s script is based on sickbeard’s mp4 automator.
You can overlay picture based subtitles and burn them into the video stream. I’ve got a working fork of the mp4 automator that automatically burns in forced subtitles, and just added in some code that would burn in the users preferred language subtitles if there is no audio track that matches it. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t work with your files because they have audio streams that are not labeled correctly, but if they were, it would automatically burn in english subtitles.
Thanks for looking for me. I will just have to leave as it is. I tried mkvtoolnix I end up with Polish Language and no Subtitles, with VLC giving an error of ‘Unknow Codec’. I am not very technical when it comes to all this. I have know idea what sickbeard_mp4_automator is. I do use SickBeard but by the sounds of it not to it’s full extent.
Thanks again for your help it has been very much appreciated.
Grant
@Sm0k3d0uT said:
I have a large Anime collection and I want to add some of my series to my plex server. Is there an option in the convert scripts that it will take the subtitles in the .mkv file hardcode them during the conversion to mp4?
No. hard coded subs are EVIL! 
@ember1205 said:
Carlo,Looking for some insight here…
I’ve run your scripts against a number of my media files and have used the settings you’ve suggested for controlling quality and such. I’m seeing potentially a 50% space savings by running my media files through HandBrake for transcoding (which, I believe, is a front-end to ffmpeg).
How can I properly evaluate image quality from the two methods to determine whether or not I actually see a difference and whether that difference is worth one over the other?
My 2016 75" 4K Sony TV does not seem to show me any perceptible difference in quality using the Plex app to play back movies. But there HAS to be a difference somewhere that I can see… So, how do I find it?
I think you really answered your own question but are just looking for confirmation. If you can’t tell the difference on your 75" TV then EITHER would/should be fine to use. So for example if you were talking about testing the CRF value (raising the number) in the scripts to get space savings the logic thing to do is compare two files back to back and view them on your TV.
I like to do this with something like the Transformers movies (scenes where the cars/trucks turn to robots or vice versa). So I’ll take the blu ray rip and crop a 2 to 5 minute action sequence and then re-code this SAME file over and over again with different settings to see what gives me the space savings I want vs picture quality.
By default I ERR on the quality side by a large margin in my scripts. I figure what I encode for my 75" TV that looks fantastic this year will also still look good on my 100" TV 3 years from now.
@Grantp said:
I’ve been watching this thread for a long time now. Never really understood what it was all about but it interested me. I now have a file with the extension .ts, it plays perfect with VLC and from Plex but I wanted it to be MP4. It is a Polish TV program, in VLC it has options for English & Polish Subs and under the ‘Audio’ Tab it has options for English and Polish ‘Track 1 being English and Track 2 being Polish’. Even when I click for the English track all the spoken words are Polish. The Subtitle options work OK as in if I click English I get English Subs and likewise with Polish.
I decided to try Carlo’s scripts to see if I could get it to play with English audio or at least extract the English Subs the my choice is to burn the subs in to the media file (I do this for my Mums benefit as she can never remember how to get subtitles when watching Plex).
What I end up with is a .srt file that is empty and a .mp4 file that only plays audio in Polish (even though it now has 2 Audio options both English) and no subtitle options any more. I have attached the output for VLC Tools-Codec Information from the original file where it appears to say it has English & Polish audio & subtitles.
Am I doing something wrong is there something wrong with the file I.E. does it not contain English audio at all, but it does contain English subs as they work in VLC but don’t get extracted using Carlo’s scripts.
Sorry this is so long I just wanted to get as much info in as I could.
The above is from original file and below is after it has been through the scripts.I hope this makes sense and any help would be very much appreciated.
Thanks Grant
See if you can validate that the meta data info from the file is accurate. For example is track marked ENGLISH really the english sound track. Is the Polish soundtrack really the Polish soundtrack?
I’ve seen far to many files that are marked wrong and this would definitely cause what you are seeing.
@cayars said:
I think you really answered your own question but are just looking for confirmation. If you can’t tell the difference on your 75" TV then EITHER would/should be fine to use. So for example if you were talking about testing the CRF value (raising the number) in the scripts to get space savings the logic thing to do is compare two files back to back and view them on your TV.
I like to do this with something like the Transformers movies (scenes where the cars/trucks turn to robots or vice versa). So I’ll take the blu ray rip and crop a 2 to 5 minute action sequence and then re-code this SAME file over and over again with different settings to see what gives me the space savings I want vs picture quality.
By default I ERR on the quality side by a large margin in my scripts. I figure what I encode for my 75" TV that looks fantastic this year will also still look good on my 100" TV 3 years from now.
Thanks for the response, Carlo.
Although my eyesight is still quite good, I wanted to know if there was some sort of different method that I could use to validate that there isn’t a perceptible difference. While you didn’t actually give me steps to follow, you DID give me an idea. I will take a few specific scenes from movies that are high quality video and split them into pieces. I will then process the pieces using different settings / methods and patch them back together. This way, I can watch a continuous scene with changing variables. If I can’t tell when the file chunks change, then there’s no perceptible difference from the different settings.
At this point, I don’t see moving to a larger or higher quality setup any time soon. So, I’m not too concerned about future-proofing the quality. Plus, I can always re-rip the BluRay’s if I find that the quality doesn’t hold up over the long haul.
But keep in mind something else maybe worth testing. If you share you server with others who require transcoding the quality will naturally be better if there is more source pixels to work with. So even if a 5Gb file looks as good as a 10Gb when direct played that probably won’t hold true if you have to transcode. Again worth testing to arrive at the best overall file size/quality that meets all your needs.
Carlo
@cayars said:
But keep in mind something else maybe worth testing. If you share you server with others who require transcoding the quality will naturally be better if there is more source pixels to work with. So even if a 5Gb file looks as good as a 10Gb when direct played that probably won’t hold true if you have to transcode. Again worth testing to arrive at the best overall file size/quality that meets all your needs.Carlo
Transcoding for remote client devices would predominantly (if not exclusively) be as a result of needing to conform to bandwidth limits and would be dropping resolution to 720 or even 480. Being that I can drop the file size for 1080 down as much as I can, it would seem that I could support a 1080, 720, and even a 480 version of the file and still take less space than the current, single 1080 version. Would going that route address the sort of thing you’re referring to while still driving down my disk consumption?
No because the clients aren’t smart enough to choose between the different versions you have. However, you can manually choose a file to play but then you would have to look to see if you have multiple files for everything you play which would become a drag quite quickly.
@cayars said:
@Sm0k3d0uT said:
I have a large Anime collection and I want to add some of my series to my plex server. Is there an option in the convert scripts that it will take the subtitles in the .mkv file hardcode them during the conversion to mp4?No. hard coded subs are EVIL!
I disagree, hard coded subs are terrific if the intended audience all speak the same language and the subtitles are necessary to understand the film for them.
Everyone on my plex server is a native english speaker, so it makes sense to burn in forced foreign language —> english subtitles to avoid possible transcodes, and also because Plex doesn’t auto-play embedded forced subtitles in a .mp4 container. It will auto-play .srt files that are named .forced.srt, and it will auto-play embedded forced subtitles in .mkv containers, but not embedded subtitles in .mp4 containers.
I’ll stand by my comment that hard coded Subtitles are evil. Why have subtitles forced on you if you understand the language being used? If it’s a soft subtitle then it can be turned on or off base on need but it’s never forced on you.
I’ll never, ever do forced/hard subtitles in my scripts.
PS just to clarify for anyone not familiar with this term but it’s when you take the subtitle and superimpose it as graphics right over the video. Think normal TV with network labels that are “burned in”. You can’t remove them or change the subtitle language since they are hard coded or “burned in” and become part of the video itself.
In this day and age it’s easy to extract subtitles and create SRT based subtitles (or download them) so that they can be used or not based on the end user’s wishes. This also gives you the freedom to not have subtitles or use subtitles in many different languages.
Anything “hard coded” is always there and can never be removed once added, thus i call them evil for that reason.
Carlo
@Collisionc said:
@cayars said:
@Sm0k3d0uT said:
I have a large Anime collection and I want to add some of my series to my plex server. Is there an option in the convert scripts that it will take the subtitles in the .mkv file hardcode them during the conversion to mp4?No. hard coded subs are EVIL!
I disagree, hard coded subs are terrific if the intended audience all speak the same language and the subtitles are necessary to understand the film for them.
Everyone on my plex server is a native english speaker, so it makes sense to burn in forced foreign language —> english subtitles to avoid possible transcodes, and also because Plex doesn’t auto-play embedded forced subtitles in a .mp4 container. It will auto-play .srt files that are named .forced.srt, and it will auto-play embedded forced subtitles in .mkv containers, but not embedded subtitles in .mp4 containers.
agreed %100
@cayars said:
I’ll stand by my comment that hard coded Subtitles are evil. Why have subtitles forced on you if you understand the language being used? If it’s a soft subtitle then it can be turned on or off base on need but it’s never forced on you.I’ll never, ever do forced/hard subtitles in my scripts.
PS just to clarify for anyone not familiar with this term but it’s when you take the subtitle and superimpose it as graphics right over the video. Think normal TV with network labels that are “burned in”. You can’t remove them or change the subtitle language since they are hard coded or “burned in” and become part of the video itself.
In this day and age it’s easy to extract subtitles and create SRT based subtitles (or download them) so that they can be used or not based on the end user’s wishes. This also gives you the freedom to not have subtitles or use subtitles in many different languages.
Anything “hard coded” is always there and can never be removed once added, thus i call them evil for that reason.
Carlo
Carlo,
Do your statements and feelings extend to hard-coded “forced” subs for scenes where on-screen characters are speaking a non-native language?
@cayars said:
I have released for testing Version 2.2 of the conversion scripts.ftp://ayars.tv
username: guest
password: guestIf you’re already running version 2.x you can unzip this over top your current setting otherwise if this is a new install or you’re presently running the old version you need to follow the instruction in the instruction.txt file.
What’s new from 2.1 is a couple more formats that it can convert from, such as real media & flash.
I’ve also added Dynamic Audio Normalization. The Dynamic Audio Normalizer re-adjusts the gain factor to the input audio. This allows for applying extra gain to the “quiet” sections of the audio while avoiding distortions or clipping the “loud” sections. In other words: The Dynamic Audio Normalizer will “even out” the volume of quiet and loud sections, in the sense that the volume of each section is brought to the same target level. Note, however, that the Dynamic Audio Normalizer achieves this goal without applying “dynamic range compressing”. It will retain 100% of the dynamic range within each section of the audio file.
Also added to this release officially is GPU (hardware) encoding for both Intel Quick Sync & Nvidia NVENC.
There are now 3 sample INI files named:
autoProcess - CPU.ini - standard CPU conversion
autoProcess - nvenc.ini - For use with nVidia GPU
autoProcess - QSV.ini - For use with Intel QuickSyncCopy one of the above and replace the standard ini file name “autoProcess.ini” with the version you wish to use. Right now the hardward encoding ini files are “experimental” and could still have issues.
I’ll explain later how you can tune this a bit for your specific system after we get some testing done with this release. I’ve only done limited testing for both GPUs mainly to adjust the quality vs file space requirements. While these might get further tuned I’m getting very good results on my computers with the current settings. Let me know how they work for you.
If you’re going to continue to use CPU encoding you will see a new option in the ini called video-crf with a setting of 18. This should give near “lossless” quality at the expense of file space. I prefer quality over size so I use a lower number (lower is higher quality). Depending on your needs you will probably find something between 18 and 23 to be good for you.
If you are NOT writing your output files to c:\convert\done location you will need to modify the ini file and change the “output_directory” setting to match your system.
Happy testing,
CarloEDIT: right after posting I tried converting 4K HEVC files with hardware encoding and it choked. Working though it. Both GPUs it appear need different parameters depending on size, type of video. Going to be fun!
Hi Carlo, just tried your ftp site to download the latest version but it doesn;t appear to be working.
@cayars Any way to force transcoding with your scripts?
Example: Got a Full BD Remux with h264 Profile 4.1 and TruHD Audio
its about 30 Gig
Currently it would only transcode Audio and Copy the Video - Output about 30 Gig
I would like that the Video is also forced to transcode (with certain crf specified in the .ini)
Any Idea?
@loibi2 said:
@cayars Any way to force transcoding with your scripts?
Example: Got a Full BD Remux with h264 Profile 4.1 and TruHD Audio
its about 30 Gig
Currently it would only transcode Audio and Copy the Video - Output about 30 Gig
I would like that the Video is also forced to transcode (with certain crf specified in the .ini)
Any Idea?
If you go back in the thread, I had a similar situation. Carlo had recommended dropping the CRF from 4.1 to 4.0 which I did. While I did see a drop in output size, I did not see any difference in quality. I also saw larger reductions in output file size when transcoding using HandBrake or HandBrakeCLI (I have the non CLI version on my Mac and the CLI version on a linux host).
I’m still trying to evaluate whether or not I can see any visual differences between the HandBrake transcoded files and the FFMPEG (Carlo’s tool of choice for his scripts) transcoded files on my 75" 4K TV for what I consider to be very high quality lossless BluRay rips (Passengers and Avatar are examples).
@ember1205 said:
@loibi2 said:
@cayars Any way to force transcoding with your scripts?
Example: Got a Full BD Remux with h264 Profile 4.1 and TruHD Audio
its about 30 Gig
Currently it would only transcode Audio and Copy the Video - Output about 30 Gig
I would like that the Video is also forced to transcode (with certain crf specified in the .ini)
Any Idea?If you go back in the thread, I had a similar situation. Carlo had recommended dropping the CRF from 4.1 to 4.0 which I did. While I did see a drop in output size, I did not see any difference in quality. I also saw larger reductions in output file size when transcoding using HandBrake or HandBrakeCLI (I have the non CLI version on my Mac and the CLI version on a linux host).
I’m still trying to evaluate whether or not I can see any visual differences between the HandBrake transcoded files and the FFMPEG (Carlo’s tool of choice for his scripts) transcoded files on my 75" 4K TV for what I consider to be very high quality lossless BluRay rips (Passengers and Avatar are examples).
You mean the h264 profile set to 4.0 nd crf to 20?
