I am trying to avoid transcoding with my DVR shows while watching on my Roku.
I have the HDHomeRun EXTEND set to “Highest Quality” in Plex, which , if I understand things correctly, should record using the HDHomeRun EXTEND’s hardware transcoder.
The resulting files show up in a .ts container, and are H264 when I inspect them.
However, when I play through the Roku, a “plextranscoder” process spawns which seems to use most of my processor’s cycles (resulting in intermittent dropouts and rebuffers on the Roku)
The roku as far as I know can not handle interlaced video if what you are trying to watch is 1080i content. The Highest Quality setting does convert to h264 but does not alter the frames so an interlaced content is passed from the HDHR Extend to Plex. Since the Roku can’t handle the interlaced content Plex must transcode the content. Try the Extend High Quality setting which does deinterlace the video.
@johnm_ColaSC said:
The roku as far as I know can not handle interlaced video if what you are trying to watch is 1080i content. The Highest Quality setting does convert to h264 but does not alter the frames so an interlaced content is passed from the HDHR Extend to Plex. Since the Roku can’t handle the interlaced content Plex must transcode the content. Try the Extend High Quality setting which does deinterlace the video.
Thanks for the explanation – I was getting a sense that something like that is going on from other research. Is there a mapping between the Plex DVR transcoder setting, and the HDHomerun transcoder profiles? – I am presuming you are referring to the hardware transcoder capability in the HDHomerun. (I am trying to dig up exactly what the HDHomerun Profiles do – none/heavy/mobile/internet540…)
I was on the same page as well! It seems I want the “mobile” profile – the big question is how do we set Plex to tell the HDHomerun Extend to use “mobile”?
@johnm_ColaSC said:
The settings are in the same order:
Native = Original
Heavy = Highest Quality
Mobile = High Quality
It would be nice if Plex used the same naming convention as the HDHR so you would not have to think about which setting is appropriate.
Thanks!!! I will try your suggestion, and inspect the output media. My goals (same as the guy who posted the blog) is to minimize CPU load on my woefully underpowered Celeron based home server (both on recording, and on playback). Do you know if the container matters for Roku playback? I am reading in other posts that transcoding might be required for MPEGTS container even if that content is H264 encoded.
I can confirm that “High” quality does result in a non-interlaced video. The video is (1280x540), and to get it to display without horizontal letterboxing on my Roxu, I had to disable hardware transcoding on my Plex server (per another forum post I found). The “High” setting seems to work A LOT better for playback via the Roku with respect to buffering time and intermittent re-buffering dropouts like I used to have. Thank you for the answer @johnm_ColaSC
@tp90254 said:
I can confirm that “High” quality does result in a non-interlaced video. The video is (1280x540), and to get it to display without horizontal letterboxing on my Roxu, I had to disable hardware transcoding on my Plex server (per another forum post I found).
I can’t seem to find the hardware transcoding setting. I want to use the “High” quality profile, but the letterbox is killing me.
@tp90254 said:
I can confirm that “High” quality does result in a non-interlaced video. The video is (1280x540), and to get it to display without horizontal letterboxing on my Roxu, I had to disable hardware transcoding on my Plex server (per another forum post I found).
I can’t seem to find the hardware transcoding setting. I want to use the “High” quality profile, but the letterbox is killing me.
