[gentoo-user] Re: Opinions on DVR/PVR backend?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2018-01-26, Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 1:40 PM, Grant Edwards
><grant.b.edwards@×××××.com> wrote:
>>
>> Pre-transocoding from MPEG-2 TS to MPEG-4 h264 would be nice.
>
> So, that is a downside with Plex.  I don't think you get that level of
> fine-grained control.

I think there's a hook to do stuff like that.  I've stumbled a cross a
few mentions of how to configure Plex DVR to run a "post-recording"
script.  I've also seen somebody mention that you can just run a cron
job to search for new .ts files and convert them to .mp4 (or
whatever).

One of the built-in Plex DVR features is to run comskip on a recording
when it is finished, and I'm sure with the right hammer that could be
bent so that it just does transcoding.

> You can't just pick the codec and features.  You pick the target
> platform (optimize for Android, or a generic Optimize for "Mobile",
> etc), and you pick the resolution/bitrate from a list of presets.
> I'm not sure how easy it is to tweak the actual settings, though
> maybe it is possible.
>
> On MythTV the transcoder isn't exactly super-flexible either.

When I got my first HDHomeRun ATSC tuner, I didn't have a MythTV
frontend capable of playing HD MPEG-2 transport streams, so I set up
post-recording transcoding to convert the files into an SD format that
my frontend's Hauppauge PVR-350 card could play back.  By the time you
got Myth to do something like that, you felt like you'd been in the
wars...

> On either platform you could also do your own transcoding.  With
> MythTV the regular player tends to be pretty picky about how files are
> encoded (at least it used to be).  Plex will play just about anything
> you throw at it.

That makes the "cron job" approach a decent option.

>> One open question is handling of closed-captioning in ATSC recordings.
>> Results with Plex seem to be mixed.
>
> I've found captions mostly work, but I don't use them much, and I
> haven't used the DVR functionality.  I couldn't tell you how well they
> work with ATSC.

I'll have to do some experiments.  I get the impression if you disable
transcoding, then it varies depending on the frontend.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! They collapsed
                                  at               ... like nuns in the
                              gmail.com            street ... they had no
                                                   teen appeal!