Transcoding Live TV recording at night

[FrAllard 11]

Hi,

I'm recording using MPEG2 and it uses a lot of hard drive doing so. I would like at night to transcode the day's recording to HEVC with my GPU and replace the .ts files for .mkv file, they would have the same name but only the extension would change. Will Emby handle this change whithout a problem? I'll do this at night when I'm sure no one is listening to the said recordings and it will give Emby the time to "digest" the file change if it can handle it.

Will I still be able to normally manage the recordings like I can do with the file at the moment?

I tried to create a transcode in a ts container and it didn't like that at all.

I'm not asking for Emby to deal with the transcoding, I will create a job that will do it outside of Emby. If I can send API calls to Emby to inform it of the file change I'll do it. I don't want to fire a post process after the recording because I might be listening to the recording while it's going and I would not want the file to disapear on me because the post process just transcoded it.

Thanks in advance.

[FrAllard 11]

In case someone is trying to do the same. It does handle this situation beatifully.

Here is what I do:

At night when I'm sure nothing is getting recorded I have a script that will post-process every .ts files in my recording folder. It extract subtitles and create a nice srt file. It then checkif the codec is mpeg2video and if it is it's transcoding to HEVC using my GPU if it's not a mpeg2video I just repack to a mkv container and then I move the .ts file away for me to delete manually for now and later I'll automate the deletion of the .ts file also in case something goes wrong with the transcoding.

As soon as the file are changes Emby will some minutes later reindex the file and adjust its database. The look and feel of the recordings library and the recording section in Live TV are unchanged and all the functionality are the same.

Emby is WAYYY faster at skipping ina mkv container than it is with TransportStreams, skipping on a transcoded file is so fast I really like it. Most of my mpeg2 are getting half the size when in 1080p and the channels that are 720p60 are getting transcoded to 720p30 and they get about 25% of the original size. I'm sure I could fine tune the compression, but I wanted a one command fit all and I found that this command I'm using doesn't really change the way the video look and save half the space. I'm happy with that!

I tried to process the commercials with ComSkip, but the result wasn't really satisfying it didn'T detect the commercials really well enough to be usable. Skipping is so much faster on mkv that I'm not sure I would even bother trying to skip with chapters and end up having to skip manually not knowing where I'm at in the video. At least manually it's fast and almost always the same number of clicks.

[Luke 42078]

Hi, thanks for following up. I'm glad to hear it's working out well for you.