I have the HDHomerun Extend which will transcode to H.264.
I see, too, with Plex under the Live TV/DVR section in settings you can set a transcode setting.
It would seem one of these should be set to Original to allow the other to do the transcoding. I would like to use the HDHR Extends to transcode to take the job off the server, but I will do whatever to get the best picture quality.
Can someone comment?
I guess I am the only one faced with this? I did a first test by setting Plex to Original, thus allowing the HDHR Extend to do all the transcoding. The resulting recordings were virtually free of the pixelation and play interruptions I had been seeing when both the Extend and Plex were transcoding. I know. It should have been obvious.
What I am missing in analyzing this is being able to see if Plex is or is not transcoding the recordings when they are being played back on my Nvidia Shield. At least on this plex client I cannot see a way to look at the stream and determine if it is playing back direct play, stream, or transcoding.
Any tips?.
Set Plex to the level of transcoding you want. Plex sends the transcode level to the Extend when it requests a video stream from the device. If your only client is the Shield you really shouldn’t need any transcoding as the Shield can handle pretty much any video/audio format you throw at it. If you want the Extend to do the transcoding I would leave Plex set to Highest Quality as that tells the Extend to only transcode the video to h264.
You can see whether Plex is doing any transcoding by logging into your Server in a web browser and looking at the Now Playing area while you are playing a recording on the Shield. Now Playing will show what is currently being streamed and if you hover over the image that is playing it will show you whether it is Direct Play or being transcoded.
You should also be able to see on the shield whether the video is being transcoded or direct play by pressing at the bottom of the D-Pad on your shield remote.
Thanks for the tips on seeing trancoding. The Shield has been amazing, but still new to me.
WRT transcoding. I understand your explanation about setting Plex transcoding and how it sends the transcode level to the Extend. My take on that is regardless of how I have set the HDHR Extend’s transcode level, Plex will essentially set the transcode level when it requests the stream from the HDHR.
A question- Are you saying that In all cases whatever level of transcoding, it is the HDHR Extend doing the transcoding work? Not Plex.
Where I am confused a bit- The way you have explained it makes sense. Especially in relation to a response I got from SiliconDust which explained it similarly. My confusion is that yesterday when I had HDHR set at Heavy transcode profile and Plex set at Highest Quality the resultant recordings were full of glitches. Unwatchable. I tried setting Plex DVR Transcode to “Original Format”. The recordings made since that change have been great. I will continue to monitor.
I would also like to know what is going on, and what settings are optimal. I almost never watch live, I do use the DVR often. Right now I have Plex set to “high quality” and HDHR to “Heavy.” A 1hr program with commercials is about 1.75GB.
@derato said:
Right now I have Plex set to “high quality” and HDHR to “Heavy.”
This is the way I had mine set up. The picture would be great, but periodically would freeze and restart. Periodic pixellation. Pretty annoying. I tried leaving HDHR Extend on Heavy and changed Plex DVR to Original Format. No more freezes or pixellation. I will leave like this a while and monitor.
I wasn’t experiencing freezing on my AppleTV, but I was having some video stuttering on a certain show or possibly an entire network (FOX). It showed as above Direct Stream, Converting (throttled). My guess is the .ts file is MPEG2. I transcoded an episode to .m4v using Handbrake, it cut the file size in half and direct plays with no problems. I don’t think the picture looks amazing, but it gets the job done.
Now I need to figure out a way to a)automate transcoding all my DVR files and b) post-process future recordings automatically.
New thread started
