I have been working on tools to manage my media and thought others might benefit. I’ve named it “Media Hare”. If you research hares you’ll find they are clean creatures, constantly grooming. That is more or less what this set of tools does, constantly grooming your media content to adhere to configured codecs, find and cut commercials, etc. This project has support for Plex but doesn’t require Plex.
I have a limited resource computer running Plex and have tried to be nice to the resources to not interfere with the operation of Plex.
It’s located at GitHub - double16/media-hare: Sundry tools for maintaining a personal media library.
- DVR post processing script focused on storage. (It does assume you only want one language, but I’m willing to make that configurable.) It can be run at post processing time or any time afterwards. If you change configuration the script will process the media to match the new configuration. Folder specific configuration can be made, for example to make all episodes of a show in stereo or force to 480p.
- Profanity filtering. Mutes audio and masks text subtitles. Maintains the original audio and subtitles. The phrase list is subjective, there are issues filed to make this configurable. Image based subtitles are run through OCR to filter, most DVD and Blu-ray subtitles can be filtered.
- comskip tuning, especially for TV shows. AI is used to tune commercial skipping considering all episodes of a show. comskip configuration can be specified at all folder levels, i.e. per season, per show, or any other folder structure.
- Cutting and scene extraction tools. I use the latter to extract cartoons from one hour shows.
- Periodic runs of post processing, profanity filtering and commercial scanning are done to maintain the library and adjust media to changes in configuration. Controls are present to limit the runs to time and/or file size.
As described in the README.md, there are assumptions. Check out the issues for future plans and feel free to request things there. The current state is not what I’d consider “done”, but I think it’s usable.
- Requires Docker right now. You could use Docker Deskop, even if Plex isn’t running Docker. There are specific software required and Docker is the easiest way to guarantee that.
- MKV container is required for most functions. There are several dependencies on this. If you don’t like MKV, you show probably not use this. Sorry.
- English is assumed. Issue exists to configure this.
- The configured language is the only stream kept. Issue exists to configure this.
I run Plex using Docker. There is an image based on the Plex maintained images that integrates with media-hare. It’s not necessary to use it, but can be helpful. In additional to using the media-hare DVR post processing and commercial skipper, it adjust process priorities of the TV tuner to reduce failures under load.
Find it at GitHub - double16/plex-hare: Modify the standard Plex docker images to use media-hare tools
YMMV. Please have backups of your media before you know you’re happy with it!
