Plex Scanner and BMT Agent for SageTV

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by bialio

After playing with Plex some, what I find myself not liking is the lack of media aggregation - there are so many "sections" - Movies, Recorded Movies (sage), TV, Recorded TV (sage) - I want all my TV shows together, and all my movies together.

It seems like a reasonable frontend for playback though - especially getting sage content onto a tablet. But I want my sage content on my TV, along with Netflix / Amazon / Hulu etc. With a single interface and remote to control it all.

yeah i hear ya. I currently have 4 sections in my setup

TV Shows - This includes Imported TV Shows
DVR - No Commercials - Recorded TV Shows
Movies - Recorded that Sage recorded
Imported Movies - bd rips, etc.

The SageTV Scanner and BMT agent are built in such a way that you can certainly use the scanners and agents to ALL CONTENT SAGE KNOWS ABOUT. so you could setup 2 sections

TV Shows -- Use the SageTV Scanner and BMT Agent, for import directories put all your sage recording directories, as well as your imported TV shows
Movies -- Same as above...

this would effectively give you ALL TV SHOWS in 1 section, and then ALL movies in one section. From there within each section you can create collections. for example

I have Movies -> Kids Movies (is a collection with ALL my kids disney movies etc.

[bialio]

Hey Pix - Have you shared your MCE buddy settings somewhere? If not can you do so?

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by bialio

Hey Pix - Have you shared your MCE buddy settings somewhere? If not can you do so?

I did, but here they are for easy reference:

search patter for kids and wife shows
"~*.txt;~*log;~*incommercial;~*edl;~*properties;48Hours*;Barefoot*;Cupcake*;DrPhil*;GatorBoys*;IHate*;IShouldnt*;Judge*;JustDesserts*;MyCat*;Oprah*;Paulas*;RachelvsGuy*;Rescue*;Roseanne*;Sid*;Swift*;Tanked*;Swamp*;ThePeoples*;TheRickiLake*;Unique*;Unwrapped*;WordWorld*;Chopped*;FoodNetwork*;"

search pattern for all the GOOD Shows ;-)
*.*;~*.db;~*apdisk*;~*.txt;~*.my;~*log;~*incommercial;~*edl;~*properties;~48Hours*;~Barefoot*;~Cupcake*;~DrPhil*;~GatorBoys*;~IHate*;~IShouldnt*;~Judge*;~JustDesserts*;~MyCat*;~Oprah*;~Paulas*;~RachelvsGuy*;~Rescue*;~Roseanne*;~Sid*;~Swift*;~Tanked*;~Swamp*;~ThePeoples*;~TheRickiLake*;~Unique*;~Unwrapped*;~WordWorld*;~Chopped*;~FoodNetwork*;

see screenshots for settings:

some info on mce buddy not much but i was to lazy to retype it
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...&postcount=688

[bialio]

And the high settings you use Roku friendly? I've got a R3 coming today to further my testing (playing?) efforts!

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by bialio

And the high settings you use Roku friendly? I've got a R3 coming today to further my testing (playing?) efforts!

yeah i use Mp4 Fast for Wife and Kiddos stuff
Mp4 High for the good shows.

both are 100% roku compatible. super fast starting/stoping, seeking is seamless, and quality is great in my opinion.

there is an mp4 recontainer profile i have been playing with which just takes the video and recontainers it without processing the file. I haven't had much luck for my mpeg2 HDHR recordings as of yet.

there is another profile AVI Uncompressed which was working pretty well. that converts the file to AVI quickly, and then will cut out commercials. I was having an issue with audio sync though, and rather than jag around with figuring it out, i went with what was working

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by bialio

And the high settings you use Roku friendly? I've got a R3 coming today to further my testing (playing?) efforts!

forgot to add SWEET on the R3. its not a metadata rich as i would like, but it is really good at what it does. we are extremely happy with them.

[bialio]

Originally Posted by PiX64

yeah i use Mp4 Fast for Wife and Kiddos stuff
Mp4 High for the good shows.

both are 100% roku compatible. super fast starting/stoping, seeking is seamless, and quality is great in my opinion.

there is an mp4 recontainer profile i have been playing with which just takes the video and recontainers it without processing the file. I haven't had much luck for my mpeg2 HDHR recordings as of yet.

there is another profile AVI Uncompressed which was working pretty well. that converts the file to AVI quickly, and then will cut out commercials. I was having an issue with audio sync though, and rather than jag around with figuring it out, i went with what was working

So it seems like so far :

My standard def MKV rips of DVD's (kids movies for the most part) need to be re-encoded to work on ROKU - the mpeg2 video is fine, but the AC3 audio doesn't playback (in my setup at least) until I move it to AAC. Takes about 3 minutes to get it working, so no issues there.

Gonna try hdhr recordings next...

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by bialio

So it seems like so far :

My standard def MKV rips of DVD's (kids movies for the most part) need to be re-encoded to work on ROKU - the mpeg2 video is fine, but the AC3 audio doesn't playback (in my setup at least) until I move it to AAC. Takes about 3 minutes to get it working, so no issues there.

Gonna try hdhr recordings next...

they will work for sure. All my unprocessed content works fine. but the kicker is this

when you start seeking and such you will notices siginifcant slow down and waiting for the plex server to seek, and then start encoding from that point forward.

with HD Mkvs, you will notice potential slow downs in the video processing where plex needs to halt the stream, and build a big enough buffer to for playback, and, in my opinion the most annoying, you will see green block pixelation and video taring(sp).

[bialio]

Where is the setting in plex to turn on the indexing (thumbnails?)

Also, is there a way to tell plex to encode AC3 5.1 to AAC Stereo when talking to the ROKU? It seems like it takes almost no processing power to switch the audio like that, which would make interop with HDHR files a little easier...

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by bialio

Where is the setting in plex to turn on the indexing (thumbnails?)

Also, is there a way to tell plex to encode AC3 5.1 to AAC Stereo when talking to the ROKU? It seems like it takes almost no processing power to switch the audio like that, which would make interop with HDHR files a little easier...

The setting you are after is show in the attachment to this post. There are some settings you can make on both the server side webui under settings->transcoder, as well as in the settings of the roku specific channel.

I'm not 100% sure that is what you are after though.

[PiX64]

Looks like Plex is working on Directy Play support of MKV files:

http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/...-update/page-2

[ThePaladinTech]

My setup is not working ... The scan has been spinning for at least 4 hours now (I think it's been going twice that long but not sure)

I'm using the default user ID and password but port 8080.

I think everything is setup correctly, but I did have an error within sage when I installed the jetty server (it couldn't download something, pretty sure it was step 2) ... When it failed I just tried it again and it appeared to work. Only mentioning it because it was out of the ordinary.

Thanks for the work on this!

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by ThePaladinTech

My setup is not working ... The scan has been spinning for at least 4 hours now (I think it's been going twice that long but not sure)

I'm using the default user ID and password but port 8080.

I think everything is setup correctly, but I did have an error within sage when I installed the jetty server (it couldn't download something, pretty sure it was step 2) ... When it failed I just tried it again and it appeared to work. Only mentioning it because it was out of the ordinary.

Thanks for the work on this!

will gladly help with this. just not at home right now. keep posting updates, and ill look as soon as i can this evening. im in CST btw

[ThePaladinTech]

No Rush, When I get home I have family visiting so I'll probably not be able to do much more till Monday.

Oh, one more thing. I didn't have the Sage-BMT web thingy installed, added that after I read the comments on the google code page (where you download it). So that got installed after the first go round.

Edit: sorry for the technical terms but I'm not at home right now either ... "Sage-BMT Web Thingy" = whatever the plug in is called that adds the webinterface to BMT. So for my installed I needed to add SAGEX, JETTY and do everything in the install wiki, and THEN I added the BMT web part.

It really looks like it may be the solution!

[PiX64]

super quick note.. if media indexing is turned on it will take a super long time on first scan.

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by ThePaladinTech

No Rush, When I get home I have family visiting so I'll probably not be able to do much more till Monday.

Oh, one more thing. I didn't have the Sage-BMT web thingy installed, added that after I read the comments on the google code page (where you download it). So that got installed after the first go round.

Edit: sorry for the technical terms but I'm not at home right now either ... "Sage-BMT Web Thingy" = whatever the plug in is called that adds the webinterface to BMT. So for my installed I needed to add SAGEX, JETTY and do everything in the install wiki, and THEN I added the BMT web part.

It really looks like it may be the solution!

def won't work without sagebmt/sagex and most importantly the plex.js file i wrote which needs to go on your sage server in the sagex directory... there are details on how to do that in the wiki

[bialio]

I'm on a plane, streaming from PLEX to an android tablet. Watching a show I recorded with sage on my HDHR. :thumbs:


The show is natively 1080i, and I told my PLEX client to send it over at 480p. Looks great...
Pretty freaking cool.

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by bialio

I'm on a plane, streaming from PLEX to an android tablet. Watching a show I recorded with sage on my HDHR. :thumbs:


The show is natively 1080i, and I told my PLEX client to send it over at 480p. Looks great...
Pretty freaking cool.

that is awesome!

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by ThePaladinTech

My setup is not working ... The scan has been spinning for at least 4 hours now (I think it's been going twice that long but not sure)

I'm using the default user ID and password but port 8080.

I think everything is setup correctly, but I did have an error within sage when I installed the jetty server (it couldn't download something, pretty sure it was step 2) ... When it failed I just tried it again and it appeared to work. Only mentioning it because it was out of the ordinary.

Thanks for the work on this!

based on the logs, it looks like you are getting files into the scanner which is good, but that is as far as it goes. the scanner hits the sgaex apis as well to pull season and episode numbers (essential pieces of the plex structure). Take a look at the wiki again, and make sure that sagex is installed and running, the plex.js files is placed on the server in the correct location, your init.py and sagetvscanner.py have the user names and password correctly set.

then

remove the sagetv section you added to plex. clean the bundles and empty the trash (all in plex from the webui)

restart plex service, readd section, let is scan. first scan takes a bit longer, and is of course dependant on how many recordings you have in sage. if you still turn up empty handed, please repost

BMTAgent.log
Scanner.log

[IM2BZ2P]

Originally Posted by PiX64

I don't use MCEBuddy to process commercials. I have it grab the video from the sagedirectory directly, and tell it to use the sagetv comskip.ini. If you already run commercial skip on sage, then there is no reason to reprocess the commercials (unless of course you wanted to use ShowAnalyzer or something of that nature). I attached 3 screens of all of my settings for you. I have 2 encoding profiles that i Use, to process the same 3 reccording directories in 2 passes. I use the filtering available for mcebuddy to only send certain recordings to certain profiles... if that makes sense

For those of you using MCEBuddy, are you renaming files to the conventional Plex format (SxxExx)? I have recorded Ripper Street and it shows up perfectly in Sage and in Plex using the Plex Scanner tools, but when I used MCEBuddy to convert to MP4, it creates separate folders for each episode. I two directories in Plex, one for converted files and one for standard Sage recordings. The standard recordings are organized perfectly in Plex, but the converted files are not.