Is this still in the works? I’ve had ATSC 3.0 tuner and access to channels for over a year now…would be great to have this feature. I mean eventually ATSC 3.0 will be the norm right?
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This isn’t to troll or hate on Plex. But Emby has this and it’s out of beta now. If we support Emby, Jellyfin, and other Plex alternatives, it will keep Plex in check and leave us an option to go to when Plex eventually gets where they seem to be headed.
You don’t have to get mad and desert Plex to support Emby. I paid for both and would do it again.
Another point is that I’m seeing some Samsung TV’s need MPEG2 1080i video transcoded and the audio is direct play, while the ATSC 3.0 channel can direct play HEVC with transcoded AC-4. I assume the audio takes less resource to transcode, so maybe that’s a possible advantage for some.
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Just because another piece of software has this working, doesn’t change the licensing or legal process for us. I don’t know if Emby has licensed this or not, or just gone ahead and used an unlicensed implementation, however, we’re going to continue with only using codecs we’re licensed for, even if it takes longer than we’d like to get things released (as it’s a much better alternative than having legal action taken against us for using them unlicensed).
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Thank You for the response Dave, Any ideas on a timeline? Or just hope that it is happening. Any thing we could help with? I would gladly pay something to get this working.
I don’t have an ETA I can share, unfortunately, but it is still something we’re working towards.
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Are you at least able to tell us if you are closer than you were when @gbooker02 posted that update on Oct’21?
as much as it’s good to hear Dave….it can’t be bad to keep showing how much we want this and how unhappy we are that it’s not available yet. so keep it up.
Why is this thread still a thing? Ask and answered for literally months. We all know that Plex is not able to provide timeframes. Accusing them of neglect or incompetence helps nothing. Nothing.
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because we want it and no harm can come from customers voicing their desires?
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I have been very happy with nextgen through the HDHomerun app. I’d be happier with an integrated Plex solution. All of our watched channels with exception of PBS are now Nextgen in Hartford area.
I dropped plexpass because of this. Maybe some day in the future…
It’s probably been already asked. @DaveBinM is there a way to transcode the audio to something that you guys have compatibility with but yet keep the better video quality as a temporary solution?
In my case a lot of the 720p local channels went to 1080.
No, because that would still require decoding the AC-4 audio, which is the thing we can’t do at the moment until we have all the licensing and technical work done
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Okay thank you sir! Have a great weekend!
There’s a couple branched versions of FFmpeg that include AC-4 support and then integrating that along with TVheadend & xTeVe this can most likely be made to work with some manual labor.
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/8349#comment:58
If you wish to try TVheadend I can help you get it working with Plex if I was called upon.
Could probably be accomplished with just xTeVe if the HDHomerun channel URLs are imported correctly (if that’s what you’re using).
Just think - you could be the first person in the world to get it working on Plex!
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There’s a couple branched versions of FFmpeg that include AC-4 support and then integrating that along with TVheadend & xTeVe this can most likely be made to work with some manual labor.
Not exactly. What there is is a fork of the ffmpeg source code that includes AC4 decoding support, however that’s all it is, source code, which as it sits is absolutely useless unless you are a programmer and you know what to do with it. I don’t know about anyone else here but I am not a programmer, and I don’t know what to do with source code.
But that said, if ffmpeg would decode ac4 audio, then at least in Tvheadend it would be really easy to convert it to some other format. You’d have your ATSC channels coming in on “real” channels, but then you’d have a second set of channels in an IPTV network and you’d manually create muxes there and map them to channels, and those are the ones you’d watch or record.
In the manually-created mux you’d simply use something like this as the URL:
pipe:///path/to/patched/ffmpeg -loglevel fatal -i h_t_t_p://127.0.0.1:9981/stream/channelnumber/00 -c copy -c:a eac3 -b:a 640k -mpegts_flags system_b -f mpegts pipe:1
Note the bolded sections, these have to be changed. path/to/patched/ffmpeg has to be changed to the full path to a version of ffmpeg that has been patched to decode ac4. As noted above, as far as I know such a version does not currently exist, except as source code. The second thing that has to be changed is h_t_t_p to http (only changed here so it would not be displayed as a clickable link), and the third is the channel number 00, here you would want to use the valid channel number for one of your local channels. Note this will not work until you have a HDHomeRun ATSC 3.0 capable tuner (or something similar if anything else exists) connected and the channels have been added in the normal manner in Tvheadend. You won’t be able to hear the audio on those channels which is why you have to create a different set of muxes to do the audio conversion, and these have to be added as separate channels. Note that in Tvheadend you can change the channel numbers, so I would put the original channels (with the ac4 audio) at some high number (maybe 9000 and higher) so you don’t see those first in your channel list, but if you do that use the changed channel numbers rather than the original ones in place of 00 in the above example.
One other thing to note is that this example would convert the audio to eac3 a.k.a. Dolby Digital+, which gives better channel separation, but if your equipment can’t handle that then you could change -c:a eac3 to -c:a ac3 or even to -c:a mp2 (but mp2 might only give you two channels of audio). In either of the latter cases remove the -mpegts_flags system_b; that is only needed when converting to eac3.
Also be sure to put something in the Mux Name field. Note I have adapted this information from an article I found at Fixing the audio on live TV from a certain network (which shall remain nameless) in TVHeadend | Free-To-Air America - you should NOT follow the instructions there exactly (unless perhaps you have a C-band or ku-band satellite dish and a satellite tuner card) because that is doing an entirely different type of audio conversion (six discrete channels to 5.1) but the way you set up the network and the channel in Tvheadend would be the same, the only actual difference is the ffmpeg command and the fact that you’d need to be using a patched ffmpeg version that can support ac4 decoding.
I am not aware of why xTeVe is used, maybe as some kind of bridge between Tvheadend and Plex perhaps? Anyway, if someone can figure out how to turn that forked/patched version of ffmpeg into something that those of us who aren’t programmers can install on a standard Linux backend (no, not all Linux users are programmers!!!), then this might work with Tvheadend and then presumably those channels could be streamed from Tvheadend to Plex. Or you could just watch them directly off Tvheadend using Kodi and its PVR addon for Tvheadend (yes you can use more than one PVR addon in Kodi).
You can just use a spawn profile inside TVheadend with FFmpeg instead of creating an additional mux to do the audio transcoding. It’s much simpler and doesn’t require instructions a mile long.
I explain a spawn profile here briefly already: Live TV (IPTV Support) - #102 by sixxnet
Anyways, the source code can be easily compiled into a proper executable. Don’t need to be a programmer to do it. Or if asked someone could provide an executable for the community.
Well I read your instructions, but when I got to “For the “Command line” argument in the stream profile settings…” I had to stop and think about that, because I have never seen a “Command line” argument in any of my stream profiles. So I double checked, and sure enough, no such setting. Maybe that’s in the very latest Tvheadend (I have a tendency to not upgrade while everything is working; I’ve been bitten in the past by doing unnecessary upgrades) but I also noticed a mention of your “modded TVheadend” so I wonder if that’s something that you or someone else has added in an unofficial mod. For many reasons I really prefer not to mess with unofficial mods if I don’t absolutely have to, but the main reason is that many people who do mods like that tend to lose interest after a year or two and then you are left using an unsupported “orphan” modification that holds you back from upgrading to the latest official version (because you have made configurations that only work with the modded version). Maybe right now you feel you wouldn’t walk away from your version but a lot could change in a year or two or three.
I will grant that the instructions I’m talking about aren’t the shortest but they will work with versions of Tvheadend going back at least five years. The article I based my post on was written in 2015 so I think by now it’s a pretty well-established method. If your mods really are improvements (I have no idea because that brief mention was the very first I have ever heard of them; if you have a page or a post explaining them maybe you could provide a link) I hope you have submitted them to the main Tvheadend project so they might be included in a future official release. Now, if you have done that and they totally ignored your contributions, then I might be much more interested in your modded version IF you actually plan on maintaining it for more than just a year or two. But I am so tired of investing time and effort in a piece of alternative software only to have the programmer just walk away and abandon it.
Aren’t people who compile source code usually programmers? There may have been a time, 20 or 30 years ago, when you had to know how to compile source code in order to run Linux but those days are long gone, and I would daresay that at least half of all Linux users (and I am probably greatly underestimating) have never compiled anything from source UNLESS they were given very exact instructions on how to do it (which is something certainly not given with that ffmpeg source) and were highly motivated to do it, and even under those circumstances some of them probably failed and may have screwed up their systems in the process. And that figure is probably closer to over 95% for anyone who just started using a popular version of Linux (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc.) in the last five to ten years. Nearly everybody gets their software via package managers now, or use packages like appimage or flatpak or snap, which require no compiling.
Would that someone be you? If so, by all means, please provide a Linux executable for the community. If not, then you are in the same situation as nearly everyone else, just hoping that someone will do it if the ffmpeg developers don’t.
You need to create a new stream profile first. The existing ones are not spawn profiles. MPEG-TS Spawn/built-in. If you read up the topic a little I explain how to create it: Live TV (IPTV Support) - #66 by sixxnet
This is a sample command line argument for a spawn profile that I already use to transcode the audio on every stream so it stays the same between sources. Edit it as per your needs:
/usr/bin/ffmpeg -hide_banner -loglevel error -i pipe:0 -f lavfi -i anullsrc -c:v copy -c:a ac3 -b:a 640k -ac 6 -shortest -f mpegts pipe:1
Technically you already have the command line from your first post just need to mod it a little for input and output. Reference the one I just supplied.
I could make the executable but it would be system and library dependent so it’s not going to do much good unless your system is the same. But there’s straight forward instructions here: CompilationGuide – FFmpeg
Read it, just don’t have that option. Wish there was some way to post an image here but the only MPEG-TS options I have are MPEG-TS Pass-thru/built-in and MPEG-TS/av-lib.
I knew it. Linux programmers always try to claim compiling is easy but I am telling you this is beyond the capabilities of almost all non-programmers, and it’s definitely not in my skill set. But here is the thing, a guy named John Van Sickle makes what he calls “static builds” of ffmpeg, see his page and read his faq and you will see that he has made a build that works on any Linux system. All you have to do is uncompress his file and then move the executables into /usr/local/bin (or someplace in the path) and make sure the permissions and ownership are set correctly, and then they just work. They are neither system nor library dependent. So what can’t you make a similar build but include the ac4 decoder?
Linux people are always like “oh this is so easy, anyone can do it, if you can’t you must be some kind of moron” (okay that last part is just implied) and then when you ask them to do it suddenly the excuses come out. You had specifically said,
But apparently that someone isn’t you, because you don’t know how to create a “community” executable that works on all Linux systems. Now when asked, you say that anything you would build “would be system and library dependent”. So there are limits to what you know how to do. Well there are also limits for the rest of us; some may have more knowledge than you, but most of us probably have a whole lot less (we aren’t making our own modded version of Tvheadend!). So please don’t say something can be “easily” done and that you “don’t need to be a programmer to do it” as if that were a truism for everyone. If it could be “easily” done we wouldn’t have what seem like endless threads of people looking for a solution to this problem; instead we’d have people using the modded ffmpeg AS a solution.
I just get a little bit annoyed when someone tells you how easy something is and then when push comes to shove, they can’t even do what they said they could do, because it’s not as easy as they thought when they were making their grandiose proclamations. The real irony is that in those ffmpeg compilation instructions you linked to, in the instructions for Compiling FFmpeg on Ubuntu / Debian / Mint there is actually a section near the end with the heading, “Why are the commands in this guide so complicated?” So even the writers of the instructions apparently don’t think it’s so easy anyone can do it!
