Any thoughts on this from the team?
Not in the current context but feel free to open a feature request and we’ll look into adding it for coming releases.
Not to reup this 2 yr old post, but have you came up with any solutions?
How about setting up a dummy watch folder somewhere then creating a symbolic file hard link via a postprocessing bat script, let MCEbuddy process the file.
The code to pass a hard file link for a video is:
mklink /h \MyFileVideo.ts \dummywatchfolder\MyFileVideo.ts
I use directory links with MCEbuddy all the time since I have stuff spread out over several hard drives then have my “media” folder that is watched, which I also use for Plex library directory, the faux folder with everything neatly organized. I haven’t used file hard links but assume it would work just the same.
So there’s lots of water under this bridge at this point - Plex did eventually fix the metadata issue that drove the creation of the thread. They even added a pretty good option around commercial removal (their own forked version of comskip).
Just recently, however, they broke that, so now I’ve fallen back to having two monitor locations - one for TV with commercials, one for TV without, and run the conversion tasks wither with or without commercial removal turned on.
At least the metadata fix in Plex is still working…
For anyone finding this thread this and wanting to drive from Plex whether a tv show uses one MCEBuddy profile or another (e.g. remove commercials from some shows and not from other commercial free channels) using Plex post processing. This is now possible, but not simple to find the overall Windows solution - so putting it here:
Steps:
- In Plex set your library up that you will be recording your tv shows to
- Add two folder locations e.g. c:/plex_tv and c:/plex_tv_remove_commercials
- When setting a recording up in plex you can now choose the new tv library and which location you would like to record to
- In MCEBuddy set up two conversion tasks e.g. Convert-No-Commercials and Convert-Remove-Commercials
- In the Convert-No-Commercials task set the ‘Ad remover’ setting to none and set the filename Selection Filter to:
path:C:\plex_tv*
- In the Convert-Remove-Commercials task set the ‘Ad remover’ setting to Comskip and set the filename Selection Filter to the following:
path:C:\plex_tv_remove_commercials*
- Do not set a output location - plex post processing needs to find it in the .grab folder where the original was
- Set your other settings e.g. archive/delete file as needed (if you don’t set the .TS file will remain and show will appear twice in Plex
- Create a batch file (eg mcebuddy.bat) with the following changing the path to the MCEBuddy userCLI file if different:
@echo off
C:\Progra~1\MCEBuddy2x\MCEBuddy.UserCLI.exe --command=engine --action=start timeout /t 2 /nobreak > NUL
C:\Progra~1\MCEBuddy2x\MCEBuddy.UserCLI.exe --command=addfile --action=%1 timeout /t 10 /nobreak > NUL
:loop
for /f "delims=" %%o in ('C:\Progra~1\MCEBuddy2x\MCEBuddy.UserCLI.exe --command=jobstatus --action=%1 --quiet') do set status=%%o
if %status% == "not present" (
Exit
) else (
timeout /t 2 /nobreak > NUL
goto loop
)
This will take the full filepath and filename as an input (needs quotes around it if there are spaces in it) and start the MCEBuddy engine (if needed) and wait for it to complete before finishing. Plex post processing waits for it to complete before moving the file out of .grab and into its final location and adding the metadata.
- Adding it to post processing in plex - navigate to Live TV and DVR and open DVR settings. Add the full path and filename of your batch file you created to the postprocessing setting and make sure the detect commercials setting is Disabled otherwise plex will also try to detect commercials using its forked comskip
- When you set up a new recording in Plex, choose the ‘c:/plex_tv’ location to convert with no commercial removal or the ‘c:/plex_tv_remove_commercials’ to convert with commercials removed
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