On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 1:40 PM, Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwa...@gmail.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. 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. 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. > > 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. The bigger pain is the way they're encoded into shows. If they're done right you can do things like have captions only for foreign language phrases (works great in Star Trek Discovery). If the subtitles aren't set up the way it expects then you find yourself constantly turning them on/off when the show contains extensive use of foreign/fictional languages. I suspect the issue is more in my source material there, though I can't vouch for how well it works over ATSC. With ATSC I'd think that foreign language subtitles would be more likely to be burned in anyway. -- Rich
