As ATSC 3.0 is now live in several US markets and there are products soon to be available which will support this and the related 4k content (i.e. HDHomerun ATSC 3.0 tuner), there will be a period where both ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 broadcasts co-exist for the same market. For those who will be using tuners like the HDHomerun Quatro 4k or a mix of tuners with both ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 capabilities, there will be a subset of stations which broadcast the same content in both standards.
When there are both ATSC 1.0 and 3.0 tuners available, ideally we could assign affinity of which programs would use the ATSC 3.0 tuner vs. the 1.0 tuner. This affinity should exist at a station level (all programs at a given channel) and the program level (all episodes of a given show or movie).
Ideally we would avoid the situation where a 3.0 tuner is assigned to a program that’s only airing on a 1.0 broadcast station when other 1.0 tuners are free, preventing an upcoming 3.0 broadcast from using a 1.0 tuner.
If the tuners do not self declare their capabilities and/or if a show’s EPG doesn’t indicate whether it’s a 1.0 or 3.0 broadcast, I believe an acceptable work around would be to both logically define the capabilities of each tuner per physical device, and indicate if a scheduled recording should be prioritized for ATSC 3.0 or 1.0 tuners.
We will probably need more options for recording also. My current setup transcodes MPEG to H.264 but ATSC 3.0 would best be stored in original format H.265 AC-4. I would like to prefer the latter option as I prefer HD.
It appears that Plex has been ignoring this request, but the time to implement ATSC3 is here. HDHomeRun supports it, and many stations are now broadcasting it. Yes, some are encrypted with DRM, but many are not (yet). One of my local stations is very weak on the ATSC1 stream, but ATSC3 comes in just fine. However, it looks like Plex can’t handle it. All I get is an error message saying “Could not tune channel (No parts)” on the web player and “There was an error while attempting to tune the selected channel” on Android when trying to view live TV. So to avoid creating a separate post for that, I’m casting my vote here.
There are other posts about the same issue that have received no response:
Been using Plex for years and now am really regretting my decision to purchase the lifetime Plex Pass. At the very least, we should be able to get a response out of someone.
