General Question Question on best format to use

[davet99]

Hi

I am using ripped UHD discs with Plex server installed on the NVIDIA shield. I use the player on both the shield and a 4th Gen Apple TV (not the 4K one). All the files are on a synology NAS

I have ripped them with MKV passthrough and they generally work fine but there are a few reasons I would like to use a different profile

• Decrease the file size
• direct render subtitles to avoid transcoding - this is causing a problem even when I play with the shield app
• Convert TrueHD audio to AAC to avoid transcoding on apple TV when I get the 4K one since it does not support TrueHD

I thought the shield should handle the transcoding but I find it doesnt. Even a 1080p file with TrueHD audio does not play on the 4th gen Apple TV once is starts transcoding the audio.

So my question is what MKV profile could I use and preserve the HDR data. There is a bewildering choice of 4k formats and I am not sure where to start.

[FQs19]

I play my plex files from a Nvidia Shield Pro that's being sent from a windows 10 pc running my plex server with the profile MKV.4K.H265.10bit.

This profile has the smallest file size with the greatest quality. It also allows you to keep the HDR and HD audio like Atmos/DTSX.

The biggest file size savings will be using H265 over H264 along with decreasing the bit rate of the video. I keep my bit/pixels at .1 although I believe the default dvdfab setting is set at .05 which is less than what I have mine set for. I increased it because I care more about quality than file size. You should rip a chapter at different bits/pixel to see how that setting affects the quality and file size, then choose what's best for you.

For Subtitles, just select the language you want then select Forced Only. Go to the gear icon (advanced settings) and select Direct Render to Video.
This will render those forced subtitles into the video and play all the time with no trans-coding. The only problem with this is that you need to select the correct Subtitle from the disk, because there could be 3 different English subtitles; one could be all the dialogue, one could be just forced dialogue, and the last could be Directors commentary. So preview the movie and select each subtitle to see if it's the correct one. If there is a subtitle that only shows the forced dialogue, don't select the Forced Only option. Leave that unchecked.

For the audio, you can either choose the non-HD audio from the start, select the HD audio and go into advanced settings and have it convert it to AC3, or select both HD and non-HD audio then choose the non-HD audio when you see that it is trans-coding. Now this will obviously increase the file size, but it will give you HD audio for when you have the equipment to play it and allow you to play the file now without trans-coding.

Hopefully the snips I've attached will make this clearer.
Good Luck

[davet99]

Cheers. I’ll give that a go

[Nik_Simpson]

The alternative for subtitles is to use external SRT (text file) subtitles which SheildTV can render without forcing the whole vidio to be reencoded. Sometimes it's easier to find a copy of the necessary subtitles in SRT format than figure out which track on the disk has the subtitles ;-)