@mike808 thanks for the detailed instructions. I managed to get it working! I was missing the “show type” options.
Bingo. That’s the magic sauce that filters what that rule processes. Glad you got it working.
Now if only we could get a “IsSeries” type filter to put TV shows in one place and specials in a different place, that would be great.
By default all shows are considered series unless otherwise indicated in the metadata. The reason being is that most recording programs don’t indicate that it’s recording a series, sometimes the genre’s indicate movies, news, sports but almost none indicate it’s a series.
The problem is that I’m trying to separate a series (likely to be in IMDB or theTVDB) from a special. Series will have seasons and episodes, specials do not (e.g. James Comey’s interview or election coverage or pledge drive programming).
Can you ‘synthesize’ an inferred IsSeries or an IsSpecial filter/category from the metadata, since it isn’t there explicitly? That would be better than the file naming test.
Can look into it, open a feature request and we can look at it from a filters perspective, if there is a season/episode number after metadata download it’ll be considered a series is one way to look at it. The key is identifying the criteria
I have SD tuners. So the metadata is already in the MP4. It should be the same logic as in the file renaming conditional test.
But not everyone uses SD tuners. Or transcodes to MKV. So I get why it might not be as easy as it sounds at first.
@mike808 just wanted to say that everything recording and sorting wise is working out just fine now. Greatly appreciate you taking the time to post the screenshots. How do you handle subtitles? extract or leave them embedded in the video? Subs seem to not be accurate at all when extracted and i’m not getting anything embedded.
I haven’t had any problems with subtitles, as I’m in the US and recording OTA and don’t need 'em.
I’m guessing that might have to do with making sure that the SD tuner/DVR are also recording the CC streams.
And then for automating, if you’re going to get the subtitles from somewhere else, then you’ll have to stop your processing, inject that special callout, and then resume.
I also think that you could forego including the subtitles and instead use the subtitle lookup features of Plex or Kodi that do that and mux them on-the-fly when you are viewing the content.
Both might get you where you want to be, and only the Plex/Kodi dynamic-lookup-as-viewed plan offers the ability to add fan-supplied subtitles, as opposed to only those offered in the broadcast that was recorded.
Hope that helps.
I noticed your setting of -40% video quality when I tried -20% it was grainy 
Am I doing something wrong using MP4
I’m using HD-Connects which don’t do HW onboard MP4 transcoding, and if you have the other model that does, go into its settings (my.hdhomerun.com) and turn that off. You may be double-mp4 transcoding and thus, poor quality files.
I have a HDhomerun Prime on Comcast dont see any settings for MP4 oh well
Your streams may already be in highly compressed MP4 anyway (even ‘HD’ channels).
You may not want to do any additional compression and simply raw container transcoding to repackage it with guide metadata.
Comcast is broadcasting H264 is that considered MP4 ?
Yes. Technically MP4 is a file format (like MKV, MPG or MP2, and AVI) and H.264 is a codec. For our purposes, they’re synonymous.
If you’re getting H.264 content to start with, then you shouldn’t compress it again. Just put the raw stream into the container. You probably don’t want to compress it again unless you want smaller files.
You may have to setup different transcoding for different channels. I’m considering that for some OTA channels that are SD and already compressed to crap.
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Had a brain cramp ! I forgot I am using WMC as the recorder so it goes from H.264 to WTV format.
It always amazes me you can stream a TV show from Kodi on the net file size is 200 to 300 meg and it looks great in HD and my files are around 800 meg and trying to reduce them they look like crap
Only advice I have is to play with the settings - the output size (e.g 1920 width, which implies 1080 height) or compression/quality. You should know that your cable company compresses the crap out of the signal - once I switched to recording OTA, the difference in picture detail was night and day. So your WTV is recording at full upscaled HD from a crummy signal to begin with, so the files are huge because its the raw HD signal, but that’s after it’s been decompressed for display. You can’t add information to a lossy compression, which all of the mpeg and H.xxx are.
One suggestion, if you already have content in H.264 (irrespective of the container format WTV, MKV, MP4, AVI as @mike808 explained), then try using one of the Unprocessed profiles like MP4 Unprocessed or TS Unprocessed.
Unprocessed profile don’t recompress the video, they just copy the video as is so you don’t have any loss of quality.