I run plex on a XenServer VM which runs on an SSD, with the media sitting on a NFS share. I’ve also got a post-processing script to compress to h.264 using ffmpeg.
At present it seems that Plex stores recordings in a .grab folder in the TV Show library, but temporarily storing it on the SSD would give a speed boost when it comes to transcoding, rather than reading from NFS and writing back to NFS. Once the recording is complete it can be moved to the NFS share.
Elan/plex is this something that can be easily achieved, or maybe there’s something hacky I can do with the library that could be managed via the postprocessing script?
Agreed, using the local drive as a recording/transcoding cache is kind of a no-brainer. Alas, it looks like (at least for this release) this is a roll-your-own kinda thing.
As an added bonus, you’re also less likely to run into permissions issues on the local drive if you use something like /tmp/.grab. This could let you recover should the destination directory have issues.
Hi - slightly off your original topic but I’m looking for a script to help me use ffmpeg after recording; would you be able to share please? I’ve had problems getting mine working.
Generally speaking, the I/O isn’t a bottleneck here. It only has to transcode at 1x speed (real-time), and so the SSD shouldn’t provide any meaningful (or needed) speedup.
@elan said:
Generally speaking, the I/O isn’t a bottleneck here. It only has to transcode at 1x speed (real-time), and so the SSD shouldn’t provide any meaningful (or needed) speedup.
Whilst that is correct for shows as they record initially, it could significantly affect the post-processing speeds…
I ended up using a symlink to accomplish this. I created my .grab folder as a link to a folder on the SSD drive. I did this because post processing is about 20% faster on SSD than on my spinning disk.
Thanks all for your input. I’m not sure if symlinking the directory would work for an NFS share? I could always try! I’m still working on the script but I’ll be sure to share when I work it out.
Edit: The symlink seems to work ok - I symlinked .grab to /dvr/ but will obviously only work on machines where /dvr/ exists, which is fine considering it’s a hidden directory and only the plex VM is expected to access it.
@“refujee@gmail.com” reviving an old answered thread.
In answer to your question with the newer versions of Plex you can have multiple storage locations added to a library. I have several added to my TV Show library. When setting up a recording I point the recording to be recorded on a 120GB SSD drive that was replaced by a larger SSD. Then as part of my Post Processing the recording is moved to the permanent storage location in the same TV Show library.
I might me missing something but in 1.7.5 on ubuntu the DVR is doing the initial grab in Transcode/Sessions then moving it into the library i select for the shows in the Library.
So if you are running a SSD primary and you dont have your transcode directory moved off it… you are going to put some heavy wear on it pretty quickly.
And in 1.7.5 plex still does not clean up its mess and leaves folders in the sessions folder… some with files that cant be deleted from within the host operating system… I have to to to the filler and delete it from there as root… bizzare behavior… the permissions on the file say plex:plex put trying to delete it from the plex server says no such file even though I am looking right at it…
