I have recently moved my PMS installation from a wimpy Win7 PC to a more powerful Win7 PC. The majority of my media is played over Roku devices so on the previous machine I had MCEBuddy set up to convert Plex recordings from TS to MP4, while removing commercials and reducing file size. The conversion was set up so that the Rokus could play the files without forcing PMS to transcode.
With the new machine (8000+ passmark), transcoding is less of an issue and now Plex automatically removes commercials. Reducing file size is still attractive to me though, so I’m still potentially interested in setting up MCEBuddy on the new server.
I was just wondering if MCE Buddy was still the best option, or if there’s something better out there.
I am still using mcebuddy with no plans to switch. I have different profiles setup in mcebuddy and can use different comskip files if necessary for different shows. I can also choose to transcode some shows to h264 if wanted and store in a mkv or m4p container or leave the recording as a ts container. Lot more flexibility with mcebuddy over using Plex Commercial Skip.
One further question about MCE Buddy - I could be completely wrong about this, but for some reason i get the impression that it’s basically just a UI that executes ffmpeg commands. Maybe there’s more to it with the commercial skip?
It uses ffmpeg, comskip, and handbrake and executes those programs as needed for converting video/audio, extracting CC to srt file, and removing commercials or marking them only. All packaged with a GUI as you mentioned to allow simple editing of the conversion settings. GUI also allows creating different profiles to match shows with so you can have completely different conversion routines for different shows.
it is not just UI executing commands. The UI takes your input and configures a scheduler that is running as a Windows service (that’s why the jobs still execute when the UI is not running). From a customizability perspective, it is hard to beat MCEBuddy. I have been using it for years and it is rock solid.
