When I first learned how to put my media into Plex, I did it by using Handbrake, compressing the content down to .mp4, and doing my best to use “audio passthrough” for the highest quality audio tracks I could find. But nowadays a lot more discs are coming with TrueHD, which apparently isn’t supported by the .mp4 container.
I’m wondering what I should do for these audio tracks. I don’t really want to keep my media in .mkv format because of the challenge of getting subtitles to work and because the .mkv files are enormous. I’m assuming that hevc isn’t the answer, since I believe that still uses the .mp4 container. Any advice?
I’m a little puzzled about two things you said. First, I haven’t found MKV to significantly larger than MP4. Second, I specifically switched to MKV because it was much more flexible in terms of handling subtitles.
I use Handbrake for encoding. If there are already subtitles in the material it just carries them over without any fuss. If not, I can add SRT tracks quite easily.
I hadn’t even realized that there were issues with TrueHD and MP4 containers.
First, I haven’t found MKV to significantly larger than MP4.
The raw .mkv file is usually four times larger than the comperssed .mp4 file. Handbrake settings vary, but surely most handbrake presets would result in a smaller file since the .mkv file is not compressed at all?
I specifically switched to MKV because it was much more flexible in terms of handling subtitles.
I should have said forced subtitles. My experience has been that the forced subtitles aren’t flagged properly to show up when viewing the content in Plex or VLC. I can’t remember which flag I always had to set — default or the forced flag — but I always had to do it before playing a .mkv. Even figuring out which subtitle track that is is a bit of a pain in the ass, since I have to test it by going to a part of the movie where I know non-English speaking is taking place. Handbrake’s foreign audio scan always solved this for me, which was a huge bonus.
MP4 and MKV are container formats, when you ‘compress’ to a mp4 you’re actually compressing the video file inside of the mkv and changing the container format to mp4.
Additionally by compressing the video file you’re certainly losing a lot of quality as the video is already compressed.
