Something needs to have the horsepower to transcode in your setup. It could be your Plex server if you’ve like to switch to a more powerful system, or you can look into a tuner that does the transcoding for you like the HD Homerun Extend.
The nVidia Shield can transcode several HD streams in parallel. However, I’m not an android developer and don’t believe there is a (hardware accelerated) ffmpeg I can write a script to. Was hoping to find some way to do it within plex to save me the pain / heartache of trying to get it working outside of plex.
Easiest way I did this for a time was to use MCE Buddy. Just have it monitor the file location. Then when it sees the files it will process them based on criteria you set. For the shield just point MCEBUDDY to the shared location on the shield.
It seems odd to need a separate program and server to transcode recordings originating from Plex, which already has a very good built in transcode functionality.
I guess I’m asking for a feature request that will allow you to select the quality and have plex transcode the recordings. This can be done while they are being recorded (for faster machines), or during system maintenance (for slower machines). We would only need a few quality levels and formats to choose from.
FYI - I just tested another recording and at 2 hours it came in just above 15GB. It’s 1080p h264 but with a bitrate of 19470kbps for video and 384kbps 5.1 AC3 audio! This is probably close to the source quality (bluray or whatever) - which is fantastic don’t get me wrong - but for most purposes is pretty bloated.
