I’ve been using 3 - 3TB HDDs for the last month, configured for Windows Storage Spaces to give me a drive that’s 8TB in size. Processing speed is much improved. I since discovered that MKV files compressed much better so I’m converting all MP4 to MKV. During my secondary conversion, I decided to see if there were any unconverted TS files from PlexDVR. There were several. So I now manually do a check every morning to make sure they were all seen.
This does highlight an issue. MCEBuddy is not seeing all the new TS files saved to the Storage Spaces Volume. My PlayOn storage area is on the main drive and most times those are captured but I’ve seen a few slip by.
Is there a housekeeping script I should run at night when there is no activity so these can be cleaned up without me doing this manually?
If you are using MKV “Normal” then you are not just repackaging your mp4 into mkv, you are converting the videos with ultimately a lower bitrate than the original mp4!
The conversion settings for MKV Normal Quality are thus:
1400k video, and 160k or 256k (chosen for stereo and/or multi-channel?) even the MKV HQ only bumps the video to 1800k.
Depending on your source material, 1400k/1800k might be perfect, but you should really use a program like MediaInfo (mediaarena.net) on your original file before converging it to mkv – you might only want to re-wrap it (MKV Unprocessed)
Using the MKV Unprocessed profile leaves the video and audio 100% intact and unaltered.
take it from me, it’s better to add drives to your Storage Pools/Spaces than it is to reduce the video and audio quality of your existing collection.
I have 4 Storage Pools, divided into 5 Storage Spaces combined have 91TB of space and I am always adding new 8TB drives to one pool or another.
Unless you are going to watch every conversion for errors, audio sync issues, reduced quality in action sequences, etc after EACH conversion – and before deleting the original mp4, I would grow your space, and not reduce the size of your existing videos.
But certainly keep using MCE Buddy to convert the wasteful H263 (MPEG-2) ATSC and NTSC recordings! MCEBuddy is the greatest!
For the conversion, I’ve got no issue there. The files compress nicely and play fine. That’s not a problem, I’m just outlining what’s happening. The issue is far more pronounced with Storage Spaces. As I mentioned, even though these files exist as MP4 and are not being accessed while I’m sleeping, I’m having to manually add them. Once I do and after a noticeable delay, they start showing up in queue.
The TS files from Plex are configured to start processing after a 10 minute delay. That never happens. Again, I can manually add, and after delay, they start processing.
All of the above behaviors are occurring after replacing a standard 3TB as volume H with a Storage Space volume H. Point being, what changes in how a regular drive vs a basic RAID striping configuration without parity is displayed to MCE that’s causing MCE to miss files?
Oops… wording on the TS files should be it happens with most files. This morning out of 10 recordings over two days, 4 were missed. Noticeable up tick from when it was a single drive giving me 1 file missed every two weeks.
Did you search through your mcebuddy.log file to see what’s going on? All the information you seek are in those logs and it’s one of those 4 things I listed above.
Just close. There is a difference in how the code “sees” software RAID verses standard drives. I’ll just save TS files to a folder on the main drive and let the script move it to my RAID after conversion.
No. MCEBuddy uses windows API’s to access drives. It isn’t aware of the underlying type (hard disk, usb, raid, network share etc).
All those are managed by windows. To MCEBuddy it’s just a file it tries to read, write, delete etc which is why there are only 4 reasons it won’t “see” a file.
No need when I know what worked. I’ve coded using WinBatch before but that was under Win98 and Win7. I suspect there is an API issue that may only come with heavy CPU loads. I’ve found a place in Plano TX that has refurbished server class systems with Xeon 6-cores. May cost a little, but that can probably handle the load better than this 4 yr old HP Desktop.
