I’m new to Plex and MCEBuddy. I recently switched from Tablo to Plex/MCEBuddy in order to have a more granular control over recordings, quality, and commercial skip. Tablo works well, but it doesn’t have enough flexibility for me.
What I am trying to accomplish currently is the ability to stream from plex (at home) to my Roku Ultras. I’m not too worried about outside of home viewing I’d like to maintain the video quality as close to the original MPEG-2 file that I receive my my OTA. I noticed on Tablo, the H.264 conversion (even on the best setting) was noticeably lesser than a direct feed. I’m not concerned about the file size per say, it appears the recordings are currently around 2-3 Gigs per hour. While a reduction of that size would be nice, storage is cheap enough. In other words, I prefer quality over size.
I’m using the GUI of MCEBuddy to experiment a little. I’ve tried HEVC/MKV with a quality slider of +20, but that seems to provide a ‘softer’ and less vibrant picture. I’m using a Nvidia P400 for decode/encoding if that matters.
Long story short, is there a setting I can use to remove commercials, maintain as close to original picture quality as possible, and be fully compatible with my Roku? I’m testing leaving just leaving it as MPEG-2, but it seems that the roku can be slow to buffer on startup when I do that (5-8 seconds before video starts to play). I do have the roku settings to allow MPEG-2 and force the direct stream.
Any advice for a new user?