As far as I know only a few clients support MPEG2 at all. Can anyone suggest what is best for (720p & 1080i MPEG2) recorded and live TV without transcoding?
I currently use an Xbox one s but it’s getting frustrating. Live TV requires a transcode, and recorded content does direct play but has terrible lag on FF/RW skipping.
From what I’ve seen I have 3 choices?
-Shield TV (pretty pricey to only use as a client)
-Fire TV Gen 3
-Fire Stick Gen 2
Thanks!
I use an Nvidia Shield TV and it plays everything without any issues.
It supports pretty much all video and audio types and will direct play almost anything you throw at it. It is a bit pricey but worth it for me.
I don’t have any experience with the other two you quoted.
Indeed the Shield has been the best for me (tried FireStick, Roku etc). Seeking is not perfect by any means, but DirectPlay also means the quality of the stream is better (try and switch back and forth from DP to transcode and you will see). Now if your PMS and PMP are on the same box, PMP is also a good solution as the content being streamed is local to the Plex client that is playing it back.
Thanks for the feedback! I ended up picking up a Fire TV after posting this question, just to try. Seems to be playing well so far! If I run into speed issues though I may end up going to the Sheild TV.
@jpirotte said:
Thanks for the feedback! I ended up picking up a Fire TV after posting this question, just to try. Seems to be playing well so far! If I run into speed issues though I may end up going to the Sheild TV.
But it must be transcoding? I don’t see MPEG2 support? Does your cable provider send down H264 (mine does but not for all channels).
@tachtevrenidis said:
@jpirotte said:
Thanks for the feedback! I ended up picking up a Fire TV after posting this question, just to try. Seems to be playing well so far! If I run into speed issues though I may end up going to the Sheild TV.But it must be transcoding? I don’t see MPEG2 support? Does your cable provider send down H264 (mine does but not for all channels).
It actually doesn’t. The specs seemed to be out of date. I had done some googling and found that they added HW transcoding for MPEG2 a few months after the Fire TV gen 3 came out. Also saw a couple of posts on the forums here that mentioned it working so I figured I’d give it a shot at 1/3 of the price of the Shield. I haven’t actually seeked out 1080i content to test that though which I will do this weekend.
I wish my provider used h264, that would have prevented me from going down this road. I liked the xbox as a client a lot, but not for the LiveTV/DVR viewing experience.
Just wanted to update this thread. After testing the Fire TV for a couple weeks, even though it could direct play live TV, the unit as a whole was pretty slow (got the gen 3 fire TV which apparently is slower than gen 2), and deinterlacing 1080i comes out a bit washed out. Switched to the Shield TV it’s a great device. Very good playback, immediate UI response, and perfect seek time when skipping commercials (as long as you’re seeking in what’s pre buffered). For anyone looking for a good client for Live TV, I truly believe this is it. Thanks guys for the suggestion.
