Moved from General Discussion
The new DVR features and integration has a lot of potential. I went and bought an AverMedia tuner and got things setup and working pretty well. My one issue is the size of the files. A three hour recording is 20 GB in size (mkv). I’m not real concerned with having that much quality in my recordings. Good enough… is good enough :-).
Is there a way to reduce the file size? I was thinking maybe a post processing script, but figured I’d ask the community if they have any quick ideas on the topic.
There are a few options depending on how you wish to do integrations and what operating system you run?
Probably the easiest solution would be to load MCEBuddy and use it to monitor your recording locations and do conversions for you to a new codec like h.264 or h.265. Most likely your incoming streams are Mpeg2 which at this point is very reliable but not the best compression. H.264 will reduce the size up to 1/4 of the original, and h.265 can take it much further then that. Just remember the more compression the more time to process. There are ways to have it do the conversions as part of a post processing script as well, but i have experience issues using that as recordings stack up.
Any other ideas from folks or is @mavrrick giving me the best option?
Looked up MCEBuddy, is it still active? Am I reading it right that I pay $30 and then get access to it? Just don’t want to pay $30 and go into a black hole. A little concerned with the CodePlex based documentation since that is shutting down.
There is a free version, version 2.3.13: http://download.cnet.com/MCEBuddy-64-bit/3000-2194_4-10764568.html
I started with the free version testing it out before paying.
There are some other scripts options available as well. I just said MCE Buddy is the easiest option. The nice things about MCEBuddy is contrary to the name may suggest it doesn’t require or need Media Center. I would hope the developer would continue updating it even when Media Center is completely gone. The developer actually added some functionality specifically for plex post processing.
I believe someone created a PowerShell script to handle post processing as well.
Since the latest version of Plex DVR saves the file as mkv, I’ve been having issue with MCEbuddy processing the files.
All my mcebuddy jobs end immediately with error: ReMuxer failed to create remux file; All remux options failed.
I’m not sure why or if there is a solution.
@spiazza interesting I have had almost no errors after the update. Can’t say no errors because there was one file that I tried to manually process today that I see failed but it was recorded back on 3/30. For some reason never got converted. Of the other 240 files since 5/22 in the mcebuddy all converted with no errors.
@johnm_ColaSC Thanks for the update. I’m inquiring deeper with MCEBuddy to determine the cause.
So I’ve downloaded MCEBuddy 2.3.13 and it is working fairly well on my initial test. Will let it run for a few days and then explore the new version. Some things about it that I wish were customizable, hopefully they are in the new version. Good recommendation @mavrrick
Feel free to ask if you have questions about how to do something. I have the latest version and have been using MCEBuddy for years.
So it seems to be running well enough, now my issue is movies vs tv shows. No way to treat them differently in the current version I have.
Can I have movies in folder A processed and sent to folder B and tv shows in folder C and sent to folder D. So Plex would have two play list one for movies and one for TV shows so they show up in the grid.
You can’t turn on the Enable custom file renaming? If that is an option you can use something like:
%ismovie%<Movies%showname%,Recorded TV%showname%\Season %season%%showname%-S%season%##E%episode%##-%episodename%>
This places any movies into a Movies folder: %ismovie%<Movies%showname%
If not a movie goes into Recorded TV folder: Recorded TV%showname%\Season %season%%showname%-S%season%##E%episode%##-%episodename%>
That could be the part I was missing, just set it up and will see how it does.
How accurate is this ismovie check? Where does it get its source? I grabbed a random movie from OTA (Two Rode Together) and it was classified as a TV Show. Or am I thinking of this wrong?
I haven’t had it inaccurately label a movie. All the mcebuddy documentation says is:
MCEBuddy allows you to create your own custom file name and directory structure using the metadata stored in the file and downloaded from the internet.
I have had a few TV Shows recently that were moved to my movie library. I believe this was caused by there being no episode data in the Program Guide coming from Gracenote.
I just tested the built in transcode on an hour of Sportscenter. 1.8GB I think is acceptable.
I’m also experiencing very large file sizes from the DVR, even with the transcode feature turned on.
1hr recording is ~10gb.
I’m running from an nvidia shield and don’t have another machine that is capable of transcoding the recordings. Any thoughts on how to address this? Is there any planned features that could allow me to select a transcode quality for the recordings? Thanks!
