DVR issues with HD content in UK

I posted this in the NVIDEA Shield section a week ago, but I’m posting here as well since no-one from Plex seems to have noticed it there.

The problem I am having seems to be a common issue irrespective of device hosting PMS - recording HD content in the UK doesn’t play properly in many cases on a number of Plex Players. I appreciate the feature is labelled as Beta in the system, but all the marketing material, eg email and Facebook announcements no longer mention the word beta (including the one today about Live TV on Android and Apple TV), so it’s disappointing that it doesn’t work properly for a significant part of the loyal user base. Any help resolving this would be massively appreciated, but I’ve tried many things and believe it is a bug.

I have recently purchased an Nvidia Shield and HDHomerun Connect for the purposes of using Plex DVR, after using Plex successfully for several years on a NAS drive to watch my movies. I live in the UK.

I am having lots of issues playing recorded content. I have been trying every day for the past few weeks. The issue seems to be mostly (possibly exclusively) with HD content. It seems to affect most, but not all HD recordings, either on BBC or C4 channels. These are the channels I use the most.

The playback issues are that the recording takes a long time (10 - 20 seconds) to start playing and then the audio plays fine, but the picture is a freeze-frame. Fast forwarding is a repeat of this, ie long load time and then audio, but still image.

This is the behaviour when trying to play the recordings on Plex on Shield (Android TV), Android tablet, FireTV, iOS and Web. However, all recordings play fine on Kodi with the Plex add-on on Shield, Google Chromecast (v1) and Samsung TV (2016 Tizen OS)… I also have no issues playing any non-DVR media.

I am currently running the latest versions of all apps and PMS (1.7.6). New versions of some of the apps have been released over the past few weeks and I’ve had the same experience on all of these versions, eg PMS 1.7.4, 1.7.5 and 1.7.6.

I am a Lifetime Plex Pass holder and use that update channel, where available.

The HDHomerun Connect has a good signal (>97%) strength and quality.
I tried the transcoding whilst recording option, but recordings never stop - they go beyond 100% and even when you cancel them, they don’t disappear, they sit in the Recording Schedule as if they are still recording.

As an example, I have made two recordings of ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ on BBC 1 HD and both play fine on all devices, however other shows on the same channel, eg Poldark and Casualty, have the issues I described.

I have searched the forum and there are some related, but (I think) not identical issues reported.

I’m assuming this is a bug with the way PMS is encoding / storing the recordings and that some players are more tolerant of it than others. I’ve seen some forum entries suggesting that the Android exoplayer, which the Android versions of Plex use is an issue, but I am experiencing issues also on ios and the web app, so I’m not sure if that is the (only) cause.

I can upload my logs if that is useful(?)

Incidentally, I have also copied recordings off of my Humax Foxsat-hdr and moved them to Plex. These are HD recordings in both stereo and 5.1. Every single one of these videos (so far) plays successfully. The encodings seem to be slightly different, ie AAC_LATM (either 5.1 or Stereo) is used by Plex, but MP2 Stereo or AC3 5.1 is used by the Humax (at least that’s what Plex shows them as.

Also, and this is something that I’ve seen mentioned, sometimes a programme that I know is broadcast in 5.1 (because it’s part of a series I’m recording on Plex or I’ve recorded the same programme on the same channel at the same time on the Humax) is captured in Stereo by Plex…

Any help would be much appreciated - I’m desperate to ditch the Humax, but until Plex DVR / player works more reliably I am not able to. Workarounds of playing content in Kodi are just about acceptable for me, but my wife and kids would struggle.

Hi! I am experiencing exactly the same problems as yourself and you have perfectly described all of the issues I have. I am similarly frustrated and had just come onto the forum to explain this exact problem.

I am a UK user with a Shield and 2 x hdhomerun connects. I am also a life pass member and have invested a lot in the setup and was hoping it would act as a replacement to Youview/regular dvr as it offers lots of advantages!

Like youself I have resorted to playback using the Kodi/Spmc plug in, but this has some disadvantages. It does not offer the live tv/timeshift feature, nor does it support Alexa. In addition you can’t set recordings and periodically I find you can’t resume from midway through a programme successfully.

I find playback on my Mac using Home Theatre is flawless so it must be the native apps on mobile devices that are struggling. The Ps4 app comes close to working but still skips on playback. The Xbox One and Android apps act exactly as described above and are unusable for UK HD Dvr content. They are great for all other content.

Like yourself I have unsuccessfully tried transcoding and I have been exploring options since the very start of the DVR program.

I also have a problem with the second tuner. Whilst I can add the tuner to the server, if a third or fourth recording is triggered it fails.

This system is so close to being brilliant and if the native Android TV app could improve its playback we would have a great system.

Any feedback from Plex would be greatly appreciated.

I’ve been doing some more investigating and it 1080p recordings are worse than 1080i. 1080p recordings seem to have a few different behaviours - and these can all occur across different episodes of the same series of a programme recorded on the same channel (e.g. Casualty on BBC1 HD). The 1080p behaviours I have observed are:

1. Incredibly slow to start and then the picture is frozen permanently
2. Same as (1), however the frozen image is of the first frame of the programme, but the recording started a few seconds / minute before the programme started. So, what happens is that you hear the audio of the trailer, etc that plays before the programme and then when the programme actually starts the video starts playing normally. This is very interesting behaviour and I’m wondering whether it is to do with a switch from 1080i for the trailers, etc to 1080p for the actual programme. I’m not sure how I can tell if the trailers are 1080i and the programme is 1080p and therefore switching, but it feels like there is something technically happening at this point that is causing it. I recall seeing another (old) thread in the Plex forums that mentioned this switching behaviour as a potential cause (with no resolution from Plex). I’ve also googled it and UK Freeview HD channels do appear to work in this way (i.e. switching between 1080p and 1080i). I’m certainly no expert in this area, but this has got to be an important lead for someone at Plex to investigate.
3. The programme never loads, you just see the spinning ‘waiting’ circle.

1080i recordings tend to be faster to start (but still slower that SD recordings) and play OK, but often fail (get stuck loading) when fast-forwarding (although this doesn’t seem to happen every time, just most times). Interestingly, the 1080i recordings that I’ve got are part of the same series-record programme as the 1080p ones - Plex (or the tuner?) just occasionally records an episode as 1080i, rather than 1080p. I’ve noticed this with Casualty and How Do You Think You Are (both on BBC1 HD). Similar things happen with audio - sometimes it will record a programme that is broadcast in 5.1 as Stereo. There doesn’t seem to be any correlation to the 1080i / p change and the audio stream in affecting whether the programme will play or not.

Also, the Live TV and time shifting features have worked fine on HD channels (e.g. BBC1 HD) when I’ve (briefly) tried them, i.e. I can watch programmes that are normally recorded in 1080p. However, I’ve just watched the last 10 minutes of Watch Me on BBC1 HD via the Live TV feature to see what happens when the programme ends and interestingly, when it reached the end the picture froze and Plex showed a message saying ‘weak signal’ (which isn’t true - it’s near 100%). I stopped and restarted the programme, which loaded fine and was showing the trailers. It then went into BBC News at Ten without issue (I’ve no idea whether the News is broadcast in 1080i or p, though).

As I, and others, have mentioned previously, the Plex plugin for Kodi is more reliable, but it’s still quite buggy and won’t play some programmes - when this happens it usually freezes and I have to do a ‘Force Stop’.

Please, please, please can someone from Plex investigate this. I (and others in the UK) are paying Plex members who love Plex, who have spent quite a bit of money on equipment based on specifications provided by Plex and want to ‘cut the cord’ (as Plex marketing is repeatedly encouraging us to do), but it’s simply not working properly in the UK.

I’d like to add my name to the list of affected users in the UK … I was heading down the road of thinking I needed to upgrade my hardware when the recordings were just sitting there with the spinning circle.

After reading a few reports I installed Kodi and the Plex plugin on my PC and the recordings played fine.

I’ll try setting the recordings to look at the SD channels as a workaround until Plex sort this out.

I’m disappointed that this has been going on for so long without any update from the guys at Plex, it’s clearly something within the Plex player rather than the recording itself as Kodi plays it ok

Can we at least have some acknowledgement from Plex that this is being investigated?

I’m having the same issues with playback of UK HD channels on my shield, i’ve tried on Version 1.8.1.4139 and no better.

The main problem is that UK Freeview (especially BBC1 HD) can switch content type at any point, even during a programme.

So it can change audio codec, aspect ratio, resolution and (particularly problematic) 1080i/1080p.

This causes mayhem for transcoding. The transcoder relies on knowing what content it’s dealing with at the start of the file. So if you have a file of a recording of a BBC1 HD programme that starts before the main programme, it may be 1080i, switching to 1080p at the beginning. Oops.

There seem to be only two solutions to this:

1. Wait for Plex to implement multi-part files, where it logs the change in content type and flags this to the transcoder. Don’t hold your breath - it only seems to affect the UK and Plex have shown how little they care about the UK market.
2. Use the Kodi Plex plugin which (for reasons I don’t understand - maybe native AAC_LATM codec support which means it doesn’t need to transcode) doesn’t exhibit the problem

I am having this issue as well. Great product but some UK based issues

Is everyone here experiencing issues using a Shield?

I’m on the Shield. Although it might be more likely to manifest itself on the Shield, I don’t believe it’s limited to that platform.

I think it’s more a transcoding problem. If your player can play back the audio codec used in UK HD TV (AAC_LATM) then it won’t transcode and you won’t have a problem.

Definitely not limited to Shield… I get the same issues as described through the web interface on my PC, the windows store application and through the app on my Samsung TV

Hmm. BBC 1 HD is fine for me. However ITV HD (103) I get no audio recorded (actually says None in Plex!). Anyone else have that?

Lenovo TS140.

@malh67 What device is your server on though?

@DaveBinM If I’m right, it should be independent of server platform. My theory (see post #6 above) is that it’s a transcoding problem, so it would be dependent on the player requiring transcoding.

@DaveBinM I’m running Plex on a Server 2012R2 VM which is hosted on a HP N40L Microserver with Server 2012R2 Core/HyperV
Admittedly the processor is getting a bit long in the tooth now, and I am looking at affordable replacements, which is why I initially suspected it couldn’t cope with the demands of playing the BBC HD recording.
But as we know it will play using the Plex plugin for Kodi so my hardware lives to fight for another day

I ran Kodi on my Win10 PC and it played the HD recording of Trust Me without any problem.
Same machine trying to play through the web page using Firefox - spinning circle
Same machine using the Plex app from the MS Store - spinning circle
Samsung TV using the Plex app - displayed the first frame of the video and froze at best, other times it just showed a greyish screen

I sent a private message to the Plex twitter account the other day to see if I could get their interest on this issue and although they did respond very quickly and did indicate that UK issues are being addressed, they made no commitment:
“Very sorry you’ve been having trouble. We can’t always respond to all reports in our forums, but rest assured that we’re definitely working hard to fix issues with our DVR feature, including issues that some UK users are experiencing. (We have several employees in the UK, so this isn’t being ignored).”

I also noticed in a Plex blog from the beginning of August that they have moved DVR and LiveTV out of beta now, which frankly makes it even more annoying that this issue exists.

Can I rephrase a question asked earlier in this thread - is there anyone in the UK using Plex DVR on any platform (who happens to be reading this post!) that can play HD recordings from any channel (but preferably BBC or C4) without any issues? If so, please confirm your setup and details, so that we can understand this better. I want to ascertain whether we represent an unlucky few or the vast majority.

@D-a-n-B said:
I also noticed in a Plex blog from the beginning of August that they have moved DVR and LiveTV out of beta now, which frankly makes it even more annoying that this issue exists.

Can I rephrase a question asked earlier in this thread - is there anyone in the UK using Plex DVR on any platform (who happens to be reading this post!) that can play HD recordings from any channel (but preferably BBC or C4) without any issues? If so, please confirm your setup and details, so that we can understand this better. I want to ascertain whether we represent an unlucky few or the vast majority.

Yep, UK here, and problems: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/284669/shield-tv-and-plex-web-app-cannot-playback-this-recording-3-issues-found#latest

Thanks for starting this forum topic. UK here and noticed the same problem. I only set up DVR this weekend do still getting my head around it.
Found the same problems with most of my BBC1 HD recordings when skipping forward in a programme.
Also the films I’d recorded (only tried 2) the audio stayed in stereo.
Hopefully there will be quick fix as currently the DVR is unusable!

@Pareet said:
Thanks for starting this forum topic. UK here and noticed the same problem. I only set up DVR this weekend do still getting my head around it.
Found the same problems with most of my BBC1 HD recordings when skipping forward in a programme.
Also the films I’d recorded (only tried 2) the audio stayed in stereo.
Hopefully there will be quick fix as currently the DVR is unusable!

I posted up a sample for plex to look at. It displays all the issues people are having. I made a separate forum post for it so as not to get lost on this discussion.

Having similar issues, have only configured HD terrestrial channels and didn’t consider that SD channels might be ok. Will have to change to SD channels to see if it makes a difference. Not ideal though, who wants to watch SD when you’ve got HD available!
My recordings are hit and miss, a few work fine. Some fail to record at all with ‘There was a transcoder error’, and most playback with audio and picture drop outs intermittently throughout the programmes.

My PMS is running on an i5 Intel NUC with SSD. Would really like this DVR function to start working properly, as others have said, I can just about put up with it, but other family members that are used to DVR setups that ‘just work’ aren’t happy with Plex DVR being so unreliable.