new recordings are being stored in .ts format

General Discussions Plex Features
1

I’m running Plex on Linux with an HDHomerun Extend (gen 1 with the noisy fan). It looks like I installed the Plex 1.8.0.4109-42bd8c63f_amd64 update on 8/3. All recordings since then are in the .ts format instead of mkv. I don’t see anything in the settings to account for this. In the DVR/Live TV section the transcoder quality is set to highest quality. Any help would be appreciated.

Here is the mediainfo output of the video for one of the new recordings:
General
ID : 1 (0x1)
Complete name : Love Connection (2017) - S01E09 - White Chocolate & Roses.ts
Format : MPEG-TS
File size : 2.76 GiB
Duration : 42mn 56s
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 9 202 Kbps
Movie name : BEAT SHAZAM
Law rating : TV-14 (DLS)

Video
ID : 256 (0x100)
Menu ID : 1 (0x1)
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : High@L4
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames : 2 frames
Codec ID : 27
Duration : 42mn 58s
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 8 295 Kbps
Maximum bit rate : 12.0 Mbps
Width : 1 280 pixels
Height : 720 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate : 59.940 (60000/1001) fps
Standard : Component
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.150
Stream size : 2.49 GiB (90%)
Color range : Limited

2

@dcolon That is correct the TS format was restored with later versions of Plex due to issues with mkv not having sub-titles and some other frequent issues , have you verified your records are good ? there have been alot of people including me that 1.8 doesn’t ever finish recording or recordings are garbled on some platforms . I think if you do the “remuxing” it may make them MKV but not sure.

3

It changed for the 1.7.6 release. See the release notes here:

4

TS is actuallly the native container of all broadcast streams and is not the codec. Your extend is still converting the stream from mpeg2 to h.264 before plex gets it. With version 1.7.1 all recordings are re-muxed when completed as part of the transcode engine. As part of that change they also made the remux change the container from .TS to .MKV. This presented some challenges with audio sync and subtitles. In 1.7.6 they reverted back to MKV for the output container largely to correct the subtitle issues. With that said though the option to remux is gone because it isn’t really a choice any more.

Best option you would have if you need it in MKV would be to use a post processing script to do another remux and convert the container again. That operation should be fairly low cpu and resource friendly since not transcoding is needed.

5

Thank you for the responses. I watched one recording and it looked fine. I was worried that my recordings were not being encoded in h.264 but checking the newer recordings it looks like the sizes are comparable.