I purchased a Synology DS218+ and a HDHomeRun EXTEND tuner for the express purpose of setting up a DVR with Plex. Since the EXTEND’s hardware handles transcoding on the fly I thought no extra transcoding would be necessary when watching recorded shows. Unfortunately, as explained here in excellent detail, the reality is a little more complicated.
I won’t go into the details because they’re covered so thoroughly in the linked post above, but the brunt of the problem is shows recorded from interlaced sources have the characteristic horizontal banding when watched on Apple TV and are just plain unwatchable using a Fire TV.
I can work around this issue by setting the EXTEND’s profile to 720p but that’s a pretty significant drop in resolution, so I’d rather not.
The videos play perfectly if I use Plex’s handy optimizer feature to create versions Optimized for TV but that creates another copy of the video and having to do it manually for every recording is, of course, not ideal.
My proposed solution is to add an Optimize Recording option to the advanced section of the Record Options screen that simply allows users to select an optimized profile that is applied every time a particular show is recorded. Unlike the standard Media Optimizer feature it should replace the video file with the optimized version, rather than keeping both copies.
I’d appreciate any feedback!
