Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Building a Media Server with Plex

I've been using Plex (www.plex.tv) for a while now but I just could never find the right setup. I think I'm getting closer so I decided I'm going to start documenting it here. Throughout my search, I've never found 1 page that says here is how you do it. Hopefully that will change with this page.

Step 1
Purchase a DVD or Bluray and then Rip it. For this step we are using MakeMKV (www.makemkv.com).  After installing and running it, put the disc in and have it start scanning the disc.  Once it loads you will see multiple lines that look the same. You want to select all lines that have a lot of chapters. That is one way of knowing it's the feature film.  We just don't know which is the language we want.

Step 2
Select the Subtitles of your language and the forced subtitles below the line you already selected. For example, sometimes you might find more than 1 english, so select them all. If you are unsure if the movie has subtitles, here is a google doc that people are updating. Click Here.  You can also set this language in the menus so it only checks the language you set when you open it.

Step 3
Go ahead and start the ripping process.  Once it's done, you'll either have 1 file or multiple ones.  If you have multiple ones you need to figure out which one is the one you want.  Download VLC Player and open it there.  Once you hit the title of the movie you'll know if it's the right language.

Step 4
Extracting subtitles would be the next thing to do.  This where things start to get tricky.  You'll need at least a Windows machine (maybe a Mac).

You need to download:
  • https://mkvtoolnix.download/
  • https://www.videohelp.com/software/Subtitle-Edit
Next thing is to open back up VLC and turn the subtitles on and off one at a time.  Based off the google doc, some lines tell you which track # was the forced subtitles.  This just takes a little trial and error.  Once you figure it out, open mkvtools and open the mkv.

Select the track subtitle and click extract.  Once it's done, you're going to open it in Subtitle-Edit.  It will allow you to review your subtitles and then it exports it as a srt.  Copy it to the folder where your movie will be.  We will rename it to The_Exact_Name_of_the_Movie.language.forced.srt.  Plex will know its forced and auto select it.

Step 5
We need to convert the mkv to something that will direct play.  I've fought with this a lot always trying to rip it as high of quality as I can so it looks good on any screen.  The only problem is by doing that it buffers a ton or it has to transcode.  My new goal is to get everything where they play without transcoding and still look good.

I used the sickbeard_mp4_automater (Link) to convert it to mp4.  Here is my code:

autoProcess.ini
[MP4]
ffmpeg = C:\Users\Username\Desktop\sickbeard_mp4_automator-master\ffmpeg.exe
ffprobe = C:\Users\Username\Desktop\sickbeard_mp4_automator-master\ffprobe.exe
threads = auto
output_directory = 
copy_to = 
move_to = 
output_extension = mp4
output_format = mp4
delete_original = False
relocate_moov = True
video-codec = h264,x264
video-bitrate = 8000
video-crf = 
video-max-width = 
h264-max-level = 
use-qsv-decoder-with-encoder = True
ios-audio = True
ios-first-track-only = True
ios-audio-filter = 
ios-move-last = False
max-audio-channels = 
audio-codec = ac3,mp3,dts,dca,aac
audio-language = eng
audio-default-language = eng
audio-channel-bitrate = 256
audio-filter = 
audio-copy-original = False
subtitle-codec = srt
subtitle-language = eng
subtitle-default-language = eng
subtitle-encoding = 
fullpathguess = True
convert-mp4 = False
tagfile = True
tag-language = en
download-artwork = Poster
download-subs = False
embed-subs = False
embed-only-internal-subs = False
sub-providers = addic7ed,podnapisi,thesubdb,opensubtitles
permissions = 0777
post-process = False
pix-fmt = 
aac_adtstoasc = False
preopts = 
postopts = 
Couple of things to note:
video-bitrate I leave blank when I am testing out something.  That way it doesn't have to re-encode so its faster testing.  I'm still testing but size vs quality, I'm thinking Bluray will be around 8000 and DVDs will be around 3000.

I scrapped all of the sickbeard stuff for right now.  It's quality was ok but file sizes were still huge.  I have switched over to handbrake.  I'm doing super high quality for Blurays and High Quality for DVDs. I've been super happy with quality.

Some additional Links worth tagging:


1 comment:

  1. Many users have encountered the problem that Plex keeps showing 'Error code: s1001 (network)', here are several solutions to this issue, just check them out if needed!

    ReplyDelete

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