I just saw the announcement that Plex now supports live TV. I’ve been waiting for this. I’m currently using a Tablo via its app (not the Tablo channel) and would love to integrate TV viewing into Plex even if it doesn’t support time-shifting yet. I’d like to use my existing hardware if possible but am open to buying new hardware if necessary.
Are there plans to add support for using a Tablo as a tuner?
Do the Hauppage tuners (WinTV-dualHD or WinTV-quadHD) work with Plex on FreeNAS?
To answer your second question, the Hauppage tuners only support Windows, and not FreeNAS. FreeNAS is another OS (think Linux or Mac OS), and they don’t have a driver for it. So unless you know someone writing 3rd party drivers for Hauppage devices (and if they do, they probably aren’t writing for FreeNAS), you’re out of luck, my friend. SiliconDust is the only manufacturer I know of who has put together driver software for FreeNAS. (There could be others, but none currently supported by Plex.)
As to your first question… I too am curious about other tuners. I’m wondering if they can develop the Plex server software to a point that it’s compatible with most any tuner that has a driver for whatever OS you’re on. I don’t know what technology considerations go into that, though. Seems like it could be simple. But maybe not, and that’s why they only support a few devices.
@abcasada said:
To answer your second question, the Hauppage tuners only support Windows, and not FreeNAS. FreeNAS is another OS (think Linux or Mac OS), and they don’t have a driver for it. So unless you know someone writing 3rd party drivers for Hauppage devices (and if they do, they probably aren’t writing for FreeNAS), you’re out of luck, my friend. SiliconDust is the only manufacturer I know of who has put together driver software for FreeNAS. (There could be others, but none currently supported by Plex.)
As to your first question… I too am curious about other tuners. I’m wondering if they can develop the Plex server software to a point that it’s compatible with most any tuner that has a driver for whatever OS you’re on. I don’t know what technology considerations go into that, though. Seems like it could be simple. But maybe not, and that’s why they only support a few devices.
That is the one reason I haven’t jumped on buying a TV Tuner yet. I’ve been burned in the *Nix world before by lack of driver support.
There is also the curiosity of how pass thru the USB device to the PlexJail. I’m not quite sure how to assign it to the PlexJail, which is mainly what I’m scouring the forums for today. To see if anyone has done it, and if they did, what problems they encountered.
Just ordered a WinTV-quadHD to test with, plex says windows and linux support, and since the tuner service is running on my freebsd box I thought I’d give it a shot. If not it’ll go in the windows machine. I’ve been using hauppauge cards off and on since the 90’s and even went as far as re-porting the freebsd bktr drivers to the now extinct BSD/OS. At the least it’ll be a fun project.
Live TV works for me, using a HDHomeRun Connect with FreeNAS 11 and a custom jail for PMS. Works fine for iOS clients, just waiting for support on the Roku’s.
Card came yesterday, stuck it in my windows box just now to get a working baseline. Amazon shipped my antenna separately and I only pull kvos and it’s subs with my 2 bay bowtie. Hopefully I’ll get more to work with in a couple of weeks.
@unhooked.net said:
Just ordered a WinTV-quadHD to test with, plex says windows and linux support, and since the tuner service is running on my freebsd box I thought I’d give it a shot. If not it’ll go in the windows machine. I’ve been using hauppauge cards off and on since the 90’s and even went as far as re-porting the freebsd bktr drivers to the now extinct BSD/OS. At the least it’ll be a fun project.
I’m interested in hearing if this works in FreeNAS (FreeBSD).
@JonMayer said:
I’m interested in hearing if this works in FreeNAS (FreeBSD).
Not as of this moment, cx88 doesn’t know about this card yet so the driver can’t attach to it.
none1@pci0:4:0:0: class=0x040000 card=0x6a180070 chip=0x888014f1 rev=0x04 hdr=0x00
vendor = ‘Conexant Systems, Inc.’
device = ‘CX23887/8 PCIe Broadcast Audio and Video Decoder with 3D Comb’
class = multimedia
subclass = video
I just created an 11-stable partition on my windows box and as I have time I’ll be going through the hauppauge ppa and cx88 to see if it’s something as simple as just defining the card and tuners.
But any card already supported by cx88 and on the plex list should work, but if not you could always use something else to handle the recording and guide while dumping the output to your plex library.
What I do know is recording and live playback works much better in windows with plex than using the bundled software or with viewing in nextpvr.
I bought an HD HomeRun Device and connected it to my Plex Server. I am running Plex on FreeNAS 9.10.2. When I try to record a TV show Plex gives me an error that says “No write access to destination.” Could someone please explain to me what needs to be changed to allow Plex to write to my media library?
So, after upgrading sources and rebuilding, everything on that card is functioning except for the Silicon Labs demodulator and tuners. Better than expected, not as good as I’d hoped for. ON the bright side, I have something to keep me warm during the upcoming winter months. Unless someone from plex or hauppauge want’s to step up
Actually looks like if you get the cx88 driver working on FreeBSD all you need to do is get the firmware uploaded to the card to initialise the demodulators…
Shame the user working on it seems to have gone… I’ll be looking at getting one of these when I have cash (unless anyone wants to donate one to me) and seeing if I can build up the cx88 driver myself … (firmware is here: https://github.com/OpenELEC/dvb-firmware )
I haven’t gotten any farther, lack of time. The existing diver would work except the sil tuners aren’t supported. It requires porting them over from the linux version.
From the author:
"The hard part is going to be getting support for the SiLabs tuner and demodulator so that the cx88 app can use the board. That can be done entirely in userspace by adding these drivers to multimedia/libtuner, then a small wrapper for the quadHD in the cx88 app.
Unfortunately these days I don’t have time for anything more than basic maintenance. But contributions are welcome:) I can give you any guidance you need if you want to take a crack at adding these yourself. You can also use the linux kernel drivers for the si2157 and si2168 as a starting point."
A hauppauge dev was going to take a look at freebsd again, but he seemed more interested in webcamd which would only work for usb devices.
On that front I do have news as the maintainer for that has unreleased snapshots in his repo, and using that I have been able to use the dual-hd stick I use on my shield. It’s currently only seeing one tuner, but I think that’s because it doesn’t have some patches that addressed the issue under linux.
However, plex doesn’t even seem to attempt to connect to the card. When running in debug I see all of the activity from other clients like w_scan. I"m not sure if the plex people need to make changes or not, but plex just sits there spinning like it’s looking for network tuners and never shows the dvb devices.
I hope to get back on the pci card again, but to be honest it’s been a long time since I did something like this and I don’t like looking at linux code.
Another option for this would be to write a pci driver that loads v4l like webcamd does for usb devices.
I heard talk of that happening in the past, but I don’t know if anything ever became of it.
SiliconDust is the only manufacturer I know of who has put together driver software for FreeNAS. (There could be others, but none currently supported by Plex.)
SiliconDust is the only manufacturer I know of who has put together driver software for FreeNAS. (There could be others, but none currently supported by Plex.)
