I just moved my Plex server to a new machine and a day later, my incoming video files starting showing up as .mkv before conversion instead of .ts.
Using a HD Homerun PRIME.
It’s not really a problem but I’m not sure why this changed. New Plex build? Did I hit a setting by accident? Is this something that only happens if your machine is powerful enough?
Is this MKV format better or worse to start with if I’m optimizing everything to MP4?
This was an unannounced change in PMS.
MKV output is all that is available now.
The downside is it breaks Closed Captioning I understand.
At the moment its a problem for me too. I just bought a software for cutting ts-streams some weeks ago. those bucks are worthless now – it doesnt open mkv files.
Does anybody else cut the recordings? How do you cut your mkvs now?
There are many ways.
I always re-mux and re-encode my DVR output to mp4 / h.264 (So it won’t transcode on playing)
Then simply use windows movie maker. It’s free.
@jjrjr1 said:
There are many ways.
I always re-mux and re-encode my DVR output to mp4 / h.264 (So it won’t transcode on playing)
Then simply use windows movie maker. It’s free.
Are you saying that a MKV/H.264 will transcode from plex? I have no transcoding on for my internal network and was under the impression that it was not doing any transcoding. I use MKV/h.264 for all mine.
I think the new recordings are in MKV / mp2ts. They will transcode to most devices with a few exceptions.
MKV / h.264 will Direct Stream (A re-mux transcoding function). on many devices,
Most compatible format across the board is mp4 / h264
It mostly depends on what the client device supports.
Hmmm … was this really not announced at all? Need to redo my post-processing scripts, but of course don’t want to do this multiple times.
Thanks!
This changes was not included in ANY release notes till after the release came out and the train wreck occurred.
This change also removed closed captioning from recorded media.
It was documented by the time this thread started. Even then it is just notes everything is being remuxed and not that the only container available now is MKV.
Also the video codec is whatever the tv content provider streams. Not all use mpeg so that isn’t a guarantee
Whether it’s h264 of MPEG2Video depends on what your broadcaster uses. If you’re using post processing to transcode, it shouldn’t make much difference, but all you should really see now, is that instead of direct streaming from a .ts container, it’ll be direct streaming from a .mkv container. 
@jjrjr1 said:
There are many ways.
I always re-mux and re-encode my DVR output to mp4 / h.264 (So it won’t transcode on playing)
Then simply use windows movie maker. It’s free.
Similar to my workflow. I used “Smart Cutter” to cut the recordings. I saved the result as ts-stream again and used handbrake to get small MKVs for Plex.
The problem: 1. I’m using a Mac and 2. Smart Cutter doesnt open MKVs.
So, I had a working solution and even spent some bucks and now I’m back at the start :s
I am very mad over the closed captioning. I always used ccextractor to get closed captions. I would fix this or they will have many irate customers.
