I’ll keep this brief, but using transcoding during recording and enabling hardware transcoding (setup for HEVC) results in a file size that is twice as large.
HEVC is setup at quality of 99 which is the default setting for transcoding during recording on DVR.
See Jeopardy example here, both are 30 minute episodes at 1920x1080 at 29.97 fps but the HEVC one is 4.32GB while the older one w/out transcoding during record is 2.18GB.
Is this normal? My “solution” for now was just to turn OFF transcoding during recording again completely.
Wh don’t you try lower values with a few test recordings of differing type and look at the results yourself, instead of assuming that it’s going to look horrible?
Fair, I understand where you’re coming from.
Do you happen to know if there’s any documentation anywhere on what the numbers correlate to other than 99 being “high” and 0 being “low”? Especially when comparing to source video signals.
The reason I say it feels almost broken is the page says "This can save disk space and improve compatibility. " but the default settings after turning it on use double disk space. lowering that quality by 20% is still using nearly 2x space.
If 99 is high and 0 is low in terms of quality, I think it’s a reasonable assumption that a user would make that perhaps their source video is going to be of better quality than a 60% quality transcode. Or even less.
If there’s some documentation somewhere I can reference about this then I’d happily take the time to understand it more but I have not been able to find any about the DVR transcode quality anywhere.
I also noticed super large files. 6.5gb for 1hr and had dropped from 99 to 70 with no noticable size difference, so dropped it to 25 and the next show that recorded was 30 mins and 2.5gb file. It could be 1gb for an hour and I’d be happy and won’t notice a difference in quality. These file sizes are insane and no guidance on size vs quality from Plex on what that setting is supposed to do. I’ll try disabling transcoding and see what happens, which is the opposite of what the transcoding should do. I mean I’d think it would help size and make things smaller not larger. I’ll either have to disable recordings or manually shrink the files myself if Plex doesn’t fix this.
I’m reproducing this problem HEVC for me is 50% larger files than AVC on the same DVR content. It should be about 40% smaller. @OttoKerner this is most likely a bug.
