Pause ffmpeg conversion if Plex starts playing

Plex Labs
1

I am running Plex and PlexPy on a Windows 10 computer. This works great. I use the same computer for converting Blurays with ffmpeg.exe, and as you can imagine this requires a lot of CPU power. So the problem is that if I am converting a video file with ffmpeg at the same time as a user is watching (and transcoding) a video file playback will start to load and skip a lot.

So I was thinking perhaps there is a way to make the ffmpeg script I am using in CMD pause if a user starts playing a plex video? This would require sending information from plex/plexpy to the ffmpeg CMD I guess, but I am already a little lost on how to achieve this.

2

You can run a script which polls the /status/sessions endpoint to see what the activity is, and then based on that, pause/resume the ffmpeg task. On UNIX you could SIGSTOP/CONT it, not sure if there’s something similar for Windows.