I have an HD HomeRun Extend and Plex Live TV, but can’t find anywhere that I enable h.264 recording between the two. Am I missing something?
more info here https://support.plex.tv/articles/225877347-live-tv-dvr/
the gear button next to the tuner
I don’t have a Connect (I have a Prime) but my understanding is that when you turn on transcode (which Plex, I hope offloads to your Connect), you will still end up with a TS file (someone correct me if I am wrong) but the content inside will be h264 instead of what the channels comes in as (MPEG2). You can remux it into mkv to make it compatible with a lot of the plex clients out there.
@jasoncross As @BigWheel pointed out you use the Gear icon to configure the transcode settings for the Extend. Any setting other than Original Quality will transcode the incoming stream from mpeg2 typically to h264. For DVR recordings the external container file will still be a ts file but as @tachtevrenidis mentioned you can have a post processing script to remux the container from ts to mkv, mp4, or some other format.
@tachtevrenidis the Connect has no built in transcoder capability so any transcoding must be done with either the Experimental Convert While Recording option in the Connect gear icon settings, or through some post processing. The transcode for the Connect is done in Plex after the recording has finished from what I understand.
and by Connect, I meant Extend! thanks for correcting!
Ah, so the Extend does h264 automatically! The way I read it initially made me think I had to enable it as a setting either in Plex or in the Extend. Thanks for your help!
The Extend does not do it automatically, only when a selection is made in Plex other than the Original Quality. If you leave it set to Original Quality the Extend sends to Plex whatever the channel is broadscast using, in the US that would normally be mpeg2. Any other setting will tell the Extend to transcode the mpeg2 to h264. You can set it on the Extend but Plex will send the preference specified in the device configuration in Plex to the Extend with each Live TV/DVR recoding Plex makes. So whatever Plex is set to will be used when Plex accesses the Extend.
another little piece of information. I see you are using an OTA antenna but depending on region and cable provider some channels come through H264 straight from the wire. For example, I have Comcast in the Seattle area and channels like CNN, Disney etc come in h264 while CBS, NBC etc as MPEG2VIDEO.
fyi
