OTA TV to Plex - Part 1

So let's start with probably one of my most complicated spaghetti works. Since it's been a while since I've needed to fix it. 

Several years ago I wanted to get the NOVA series onto my Plex, because I had fond memories of watching random Nova episodes on PBS growing up, and wanted to have the opportunity to watch it at my will. So I started looking into how to do that.

My first hurdle was just being able to capture/record Over-The-Air(OTA) broadcasts. This, after some research, turned out to be the simplest of the problems that arose in the development of my ripping process. The research in question turned up the HDHomeRun CONNECT DUO device, which is produced by the SiliconDust company. The device has 2 Digital TV tuners and 1 Ethernet port, and allows you to watch OTA broadcasts on your local tablet, phone, or computer. 

The operative word being "computer", so problem 1 was solved, onto problem 2, how to record the programs from the HDHomeRun. This also turned out to be surprisingly easy, as Plex already included the software to interface with the HDHomeRun. So once I setup the HDHomeRun and added it to Plex, I was able to schedule and record shows from the HDHomeRun. So I scheduled out for some NOVA episodes, and let it do its thing, as the recording was a couple days away. 

Finally the day after the scheduled recording, I got a nice surprise in that the new NOVA episode showed up automatically on my plex. Wonderful! Everything fell into place and I could relax and let the episodes roll in. 

That is, until I realized that plex was recording into MPEG(ts) files...