Shell scripts still rule!
I have my personal PLEX setup at home running from a Raspberry Pi. It is easy to manage and is useful in many occasions.
My Samsung TV has issues when loading a video file that has over 30 tracks (video/audio/subtitles). This was not a general problem in the past, but I am glad that the PLEX documentation mentions it. (It was hard to find)
Removing subtitles
Trying to fix the issue I came across mkvtoolnix tool that helps re-muxing the video files and remove all the tracks that I do not need.
The command to do so is quite simple. First one selects 2 & 3 subtitle tracks (Subtitle Id can differ). The second command just removes all subtitles from the video file.
mkvmerge -o output.mkv -s 2,3 input.mkv
or
mkvmerge -o output.mkv --no-subtitles input.mkv
I quickly created a small shell script that iterates through my video files and creates new versions for me.
for file in *mkv; do
sudo mkvmerge -o "${file%.mkv}".PLEX.mkv -s 2,3 "$file"
done
Super! My issue is fixed, but I don’t want to manually log on to my Pi every time and run the command. This lead me to automate this task even further.
Automating subtitles removal
Then I found inotifywait from inotify-tools. This monitors directory tree for changes and can call an action on events like file created, modified, etc.
This prompted me to write a script combining the two tools and also adding some logic to the script. Ended up with the following script:
This script activates on new files. Filters out files created after the subtitles have been removed and also files that do not meet a certain criteria. I also automated the removal of these files. If the original file is not present anymore then this script also removes the altered version.
Making it a service
The next step is to create a service out of this script that is started at system boot.
For this a file must be created at /etc/systemd/system/sub-remover.service
The contents should be:
[Unit]
Description=Subtitle Remover Service
After=network.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/mnt/subremover/subremover.sh /mnt
Restart=always
User=pi
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
The important part is the ExecStart this should point to the shell script file and should also have the folder it will be looking at. In this case the subremover.sh path with /mnt as the folder it should look at.
To enable the service run:
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable sub-remover.service
For managing the service you can use:
sudo systemctl start sub-remover.service
sudo systemctl stop sub-remover.service
sudo systemctl status sub-remover.service
For checking the logs of the service:
sudo journalctl -u sub-remover.service -f
Use -f to follow the logs live.
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