I purchased a 4 Tuner HD Homerun which has been great.
The MP2 Transport streams though can’t seem to be Direct Played by my Samsung TV, LG TV or Apple TV’s. As a result the CPU takes a major hit when those are being streamed. If i enable Transcoding in Plex on the DVR that will at least spit out a h.264 file that can be Direct Played. But i pay the CPU Penalty at the start, my 6700k can just cope with 4 Recordings but then i can’t use Plex for anything else.
My suggestion is DVR record to MP2 there is no processor hit per channel then. Move Transcoding to Scheduled Tasks, it can be done nightly when the server is idle. In addition because Transcoding from MP2 to H264 is being done when the file is completed it will be better compressed. So drive space savings will be reflected.
Most people are recording on their Plex DVR between 6pm and 10pm and they likely are also streaming other shows or movies between 6pm and 10pm. It makes sense to shift any heavy processing to midnight - 6am when the server is practically idle.
Commerical Removal can also be moved to this later period.
I have been playing around with Commskip as well and it turns out you can actually get it to remove the commericals and spit out a H.264 file in the same process. The H.264 file isn’t that great encoding wise maybe why Plex isn’t using it.
Currently i have a handbrake docker that starts at midnight and is paused at 6am. It will go through the recorded TV folder and look for .ts file converting them to h.264 Fast 1080p30. It speeds up everything later when someone goes to watch a program since its all Direct Play and the file sizes are 60% smaller most of the time. I usually find 1-2 programs are direct streamed on the night like the news. But the following day there is no CPU penalty for those programs and thats when they are usually accessed.
