Convert ALL movies

General Discussions
1

Hi,

I’ve been using Plex for what seems like forever but with the latest version of PMS not supporting my ancient Mac Pro I have decided to move everything over to a Synology NAS (a DS416Play) and run PMS on there. Whilst this is a great solution to have some central storage, and to save some money on power, the DS416Play can’t transcode all of my movies.

I’ve been thinking about converting my movies into a format/container that doesn’t need any transcoding, and generally when discussing this the advice is to use Handbrake to do so. However, I have approximately 600 movies and converting each one would take forever.

Is there any way I can get the Plex Media Server to convert my movies for me? I know it can create “Optimised Versions” but that is creating an additional file, when what I want is just one “ideal” file to play on my devices.

In the main, I use either a 4th Gen AppleTV, or my Samsung 4k 2015 Smart TV to play the movies, and I would like to keep the surround tracks as I have a 5.1 setup in the living room.

If Plex can’t do this is there any other macOS application that I can just point at my Movies folder, select the formats I require, and click “Go” and have it convert all of my files?

My files are stored in the following folder structure,

{Movies} -> {Name of Movie (Year)} -> Name of Movie.mkv

Thanks in advance.

Alistair

2

If you optimize your movies to a specific location / share, you next pull the sneaky trick of stealing away the output files into something (another share) PMS isn’t associated with yet.

When all are done, add the ‘new share’ as a Library, confirm all is as you want it.

You’re then free to start deleting the other and the optimized versions (PMS will think they are there but are not so no harm is done)

3

Excellent, thanks for the reply :slight_smile:

Now for the next question, which is the best “Profile” to choose when optimising? Will it retain the 5.1 audio?

4

I would perform a test.

  1. Create a new share on the NAS

  2. Create the library to attach to it as the PMS ‘destination’ for optimization

  3. Use Custom profile… Testing Universal TV and XBox One

5

Chuck from my testing when optimizing tv shows
a show called
American Crime - 1x01 - Episode One.mp4
ends up as
1x01 - Episode One.mp4.
That might cause plenty of confusion in the newly created folder

6

Did it create any sense of structure ( the parent directory being the series name) ?

What I create here says no. Please confirm or tell me otherwise.

7

Hey Chuck
At this very moment optimize is actually not working.
Click to optimize to original folder ( or nominated ) as mobile or original and immediately says complete and the new copy nowhere to be found.

Busy now but will have another go later or tomorrow …

cheers

8

I did some testing (we all did actually). After some discussion among several ninjas and staff, we wrote up a RFE.

In that RFE, we asked for:

“When optimizing, if the destination folder is not the same as the source folder, include the series name as part of the output file name. Doing so will allow tools such as FileBot to properly recreate a viable structure for the optimized file(s)”. This obviously lead to having PMS write the file names in the perfect form (a benefit for all).

How the devs think of this is anyone’s guess. We know they are slammed right now but not on what. If there are questions or feedback, we’ll hear :slight_smile:

Please let me know what you find out

9

MP4 Tools will repackage in mp4 container, can edit/add tracks. Plenty of preset profiles to choose from. Optimizes files for direct streaming. No encoding (unless you choose to) so minimal time needed per file. Have used for a long time, easy peasy.

10

@swordsandtequila said:
MP4 Tools will repackage in mp4 container, can edit/add tracks. Plenty of preset profiles to choose from. Optimizes files for direct streaming. No encoding (unless you choose to) so minimal time needed per file. Have used for a long time, easy peasy.

Thanks, that sounds like HandBrake and mkvtoonix/mkvmerge combined in a lighter form. Good to know.

11

@swordsandtequila said:
MP4 Tools will repackage in mp4 container, can edit/add tracks. Plenty of preset profiles to choose from. Optimizes files for direct streaming. No encoding (unless you choose to) so minimal time needed per file. Have used for a long time, easy peasy.

Mac only?

12

@spikemixture said:

@swordsandtequila said:
MP4 Tools will repackage in mp4 container, can edit/add tracks. Plenty of preset profiles to choose from. Optimizes files for direct streaming. No encoding (unless you choose to) so minimal time needed per file. Have used for a long time, easy peasy.

Mac only?

Yep. Certainly there’s got to be something comparable on the windows side, hopefully somebody chimes in.

13

If you had any scripting support, or you have windows 10 and the linux subsystem enabled, you can do it using ffmpeg and tcsh.

IF you had a bunch of files in the same directory to be converted (Yes, this outer loop can be easily expanded to span directories), Change all the MKV files to MP4 and optimize the MP4 for Web streaming and deposit the new MP4 files in “/mp4movies”

Note: You may also insert any conversion parameters you want at the appropriate places.

#!/bin/tcsh

foreach i (*.mkv)
  ffmpeg -i "$i" -c:v copy -c:a copy -movflags faststart "/mp4movies/${i:r}.mp4"
end
14

If all you want to do is change the container and possibly remove some audio or subtitle files I use Remux. It has a batch feature which is quite convenient. It does not rename any files. Don’t know if it is mac only but i use it on my Mac.