errr
Thanks for elaborating. I am FAR too prolific a script writer than should be allowed 
To do a turnkey (which I presume to be “self adaptive”), you’ll need to read the headers.
Tools of choice here are, mediainfo or ffmpeg
In either case, you’ll need to parse the output.
The script will need to accept the output from one of those tools, digest it, and determine which tracks to keep or discard.
From there, you can be very specific in your selection of track IDs for mkvmerge
I see. I’m a script writer/code slinger so I’ll see what I can do to sort that out. Is this a good forum, and tag you?, for assistance in making sure I am properly interpreting headers?
I’m also running on ESXi, but only have a 4 core (physical) with 16GB of RAM. I’ve streamed 4 1080p streams (of varying qualities) to different locations and I’ve barely had any issues (some buffering, but that’s limited). My PMS server has 3 cores assigned and is installed on two 7200RPM HDDs in RAID 1. My media is then stored on a NAS and my network is a hardwired 1Gbps LAN.
Given the above, I find it hard to believe that you are having any issues with your hardware. However, have you tried allocating the right amount of CPU cores to it? How about reserving clock speed for it?
Let me know if this helps at all or if you’re struggling for performance.
I’m probably a lot less well versed than some people here with regard to Plex as an application, but I’m pretty OK with VMware and servers in general.
I think we figured out it isn’t my hardware but the subtitles in my mkv files. They are PGS encoded which relies on a third party library that PMS uses that is single threaded. Which is a design problem the Plex team can’t address unless they want to write it themselves which is a costly undertaking. The solution is to convert the subtitles to something other than PGS or remove them altogether.
So now I’m looking at right a tool to make this subtitle business turnkey. Because I just want to buy a BR, drop it in my drive and hit the go button. So I’ll start looking into that soon.
Ah, OK. Cool.
I thought it was a bit strange given what hardware you said you were running.
I may be a bit narrow-minded here, but does anyone ever actually use subtitles? I don’t think I ever have. I mean, obviously films that are not in English Audio. It’s probably easier to just get rid IMHO. But then you may have very good reason to want them.
Anyway, hope you get it sorted.
Best,
I only care about forced subtitles in English. Sicario 2 has substantial scenes in another language. Just as an example.
Ah, I see. Like in Game of Thrones where the spoken language is Dothraky, you want those parts subbed in English. In those cases, it’s probably better to try an hardcode the subs onto the media. Again, IMO.
1 Like
If you need a second pair of eyes or hands, tag me.
I will be largely out of pocket the next few days (too much driving around the east coast) because my car doesn’t yet have auto-drive. 
haha
I am new to this, but I have had some experiences similar to you and here is what I have learned :
-
First, if you are using MKV files and selecting the subtitles, then everything is getting transcoded. There are transcoding settings under “Settings” -> “Transcoder” -> “Transcoder Quality”. For example, I have mine at “Make my CPU hurt”, but I have 12 cores (or 24 threaded CPUs).
-
About SSDs : SSDs are great, but there are SSDs and there are SSDs. The brand (and specs) are important. These are unlike SATA III or SAS. Although this may not be your issue, you should look at your SSD drive specifications just to make sure and/or try this on a different type of disk (I am saying this because I had a strange experience with my other disks “disappearing” when using Inland SSDs but not Samsung).
-
What OS are you running ? I originally selected CentOS but had issues with it working. I am still unsure of what the issue was but when I switched to Debian my system started flying (remember, I have 24 CPUs on bare metal).
-
What kind of hardware are you using ? As I mentioned before, I was experiencing issues. It might have been because I have a somewhat sophisticated piece of hardware (a Dell Poweredge R-510 with an H700 PERC and a dual-onboard Netxtreme II Gigabit). When I installed a third party PCIe Gigabit card and disabled the Netxtremes a lot of my bandwidth issues went away.
-
You said that you are using ESXi. That means that you are in a “shared” (virtualized) environment and using VMware drivers (back again to my OS issue). My suggestion would be that you first try this on a non-ESXi environment first and then port it over when its working.
In short, there are a lot of reasons why you could have the issues that you are having but that may not be related to CPU utilization (as an example, I originally tried a “Raid-1” configuration, and I experienced issues while the disks were being “initialized” in the background by the Raid Controller).
I believe 1 is my issue. Others have already noted that. Even if it is a virtualized environment, the CPU and disk utilization demonstrate I am not resource bound. I appreciate the time to address this. I’m still trying to find the easy button for BR to MKV extraction when it comes to forced subtitles. I may write the easy button scripts others have suggested.
Maybe, the issue with virtualization is that it adds a level of abstraction that “hides” some of the underlying hardware to the the user/application. It also depends on what your other guests are doing. For example, if you are sharing a “bridge” interface, that means that the bandwidth available is not necessarily all yours. Also, it means that you are using their hardware drivers (which I personally think was my issue). But if you think that you have resolved your issue, then great. Good luck.
It has already been demonstrated my issue is due to PGS subtitles which would happen on any hardware environment or OS environment.
I appreciate everyone’s contribution to the discussion.
More on ESXi and driver issues or shared resource contention and loading issues. I always use white list hardware for my ESXi installs to avoid all driver issues. Right now I have a 4 port NIC and an HBA that are used in Dell servers running ESXi for this very reason. I want to avoid issues that are a royal pain to resolve. When I do my throughput testing I can get right around 840Mbps from a VM over my LAN assuming nothing else is happening over that physical NIC. I haven’t tested throughput when multiple VMs are using the same NIC. I will consider running that test some day just to know what my overhead is. I haven’t done any HBA testing other than to confirm it solved a lot of performance issues I had with the built in HBA on my motherboard.
But back to my core issues. I will be writing scripts to do the easy button recoding of the forced subtitles tracks so I don’t encounter the single threaded code in PMS.
If this thread has been discussed and answered to your satisfaction, I will close it for you if you wish
Can it be reopened at a later date? I suppose I can repost and cite this one if similar issues arise. Right now my battle isn’t why I posted. It’s to come up with the easy button script. Could you post a started thread and tag me in it, or PM me the link to it so we can start the discussion on how to build this script? I just need some pointers to get rockin’ on it, but I definitely want to build it for myself and share with the community.
Any mod can reopen it or you’re free to create a new thread (preferred for new problems).
Your choice.
Go ahead and close this one. I’ll reopen another one and tag you in it when I’m ready to start digging into the scripting. Thanks for all of your help!
