Plex DVR Options

Feature Suggestions
1

Hello,

Any chance in the future we can get some additional DVR options?

  1. It would be great to have specific location you can define while you are recording. Seems the default is the .grab folder for each library (TV Shows/Movies). This is typically not local to my plex server and I would like to use a separate location for various reasons. I want to run it through some post processing before placing in it’s respected library.

  2. I would like to have an option to specify a separate transcoding location. I typically use ramdisk about 4gb and ever since version 1.15.x it’s been unable to record shows due to length would consume more than 4gb of space so they fail regularly. The only way to fix this is to change the overall transcode directory and I’m not longer able to use ramdisk.

2

I would like to add a concrete Mac/NAS use case to this request.

Plex Media Server runs on a Mac mini with fast local SSD storage, while the media library is located on a NAS that is normally spun down. We want to record DVR programs to the local SSD so the NAS does not wake for every recording and so the recording write path remains local.

After the recording finishes, a post-processing script should be able to transcode the file, for example to HEVC, and hand the result back to Plex. Plex should then move or commit the processed file to the configured final library path on the NAS while preserving the recording identity and metadata.

Currently, the .grab directory is tied to the library location and the post-processing hook runs before Plex finalizes the recording. If an external script later moves the file from the Mac path to the NAS, Plex may retain the old path and the DVR item or metadata can become unavailable. Symlinks can hide this problem, but leave symlinks in the local library structure and depend on the NAS mount being available.

Requested feature: allow a per-DVR or per-recording-job capture/staging path separate from the final library destination, together with a supported post-processing commit/move handoff.

Plex should preserve the recording identity, EPG metadata, watched state, and recording schedule. The handoff should be atomic and recoverable if the NAS is temporarily unavailable.

This would support the common Plex-on-computer / media-on-NAS setup without breaking Plex’s database or requiring symlinks.