At the moment, I am sorry to say that watching Live TV has generally been a disappointment mainly due to:
inability of Fire TV to deinterlace Live TV resulting in very noticeable combing effects with rapid movement
DVR schedule page on latest Android TV (FireTV) build not working correctly - complete inability to play recordings without going into recently added or all shows view which is not intuitive
The ideal of course is to get the above two deficiencies addressed by the Plex team. By providing a check box to enable Live TV to be deinterlaced by the PMS transcoder for the former and fixing the DVR schedule page for the latter. That said, I would be interested to know if there are any devices that can be plugged into the back of a screen that work right now in the way intended. Shield by the way suffers from the same DVR schedule problem…
I wish the Plex team would provide better guidance on de-interlacing for Live TV, there have been numerous posts from people saying similar things. To me, I’ve bought a Fire TV box to run Plex but it’s simply not up to the job for Live TV unless people can tell me otherwise…
most of the suggestions on here I see are Nvidia Shield, Roku or AppleTV. Most of the issues I had on live TV were due to the server it was on and a few issues that needed fixed, which both have been remedied for me. Does the Fire TV support direct play or were you transcoding the live feed.
you got some more info on that update - which one, etc? saw a new post this morning here about it not being supported still so everyone might not know. thanks.
I can test my 4K Stick later (it’s the model that came out last year), but Amazon added full hardware support for MPEG2 including deinterlacing on the model. I haven’t used mine recently (using a Roku), so it’s possible there’s an issue I’m not aware of.
It would be fantastic if PMS provided the option to deinterlace video so that devices who can’t deinterlace show video correctly. I would have thought for Live TV it would be a no-brainer on the basis a good number of people would use Plex on their normal TV using a suitable device connected to it - a good proportion of which do not support deinterlacing…
Any update on this topic? I have a Fire TV Stick (2nd gen). It doesn’t deinterlace. I’m looking for the best client. I’ve ordered a new Fire TV 4k. Does Roku work reliably? I’ve read mixed information for Roku.
I have a Nvidia shield and love it but I’ve recently replaced it with a firestick 4K for live TV and it works amazing. I have two Nvidia Shield’s, 7 firestick 4k’s, and 5 roku’s. For live TV I prefer the firestick 4K direct play, Works amazing.
I use 3 hdhomerun Primes and two hdhomerun connects. Yes the fire-stick 4K used to buffer quite a bit but that seems to be resolved in some of the most recent updates. Don’t get me wrong it still buffers once in a blue moon but it’s pretty stable. You have to make sure you have a powerful router and you’re on the 5 gigahertz Network. I personally use a nest Wi-Fi router which has a quad core 1.4 CPU. Which has helped quite a bit with buffering.
Also make sure you using Cat5e or higher from your router to your Plex Media Server. The Fire Sticks and Nvidia Shield can surge anywhere from a hundred megabits all the way up to 750 when starting live TV.
So I guess the moral of the story is Roku is the most stable. Android TV/ Firestick/ Nvidia Shield have intermittent issues with their public stable version of Plex. This pertains to live TV only. I’ve had more issues with the fire stick in the past week then I’ve had with Roku in the past year-and-a-half. And this is a common occurrence with Android for some reason. There is so many variances of Android TV it makes it harder to make one Plex app that works on all. Roku on the other hand must be easier to develop for. Ultimately I think I’m going to switch back to roku’s even though I don’t like the slower guide and the picture quality is not as nice. But it’s stable!
I just got a TV with Roku built in. The Roku app doesn’t seem to keep the streaming settings. I have to go in and set it to Original and MPEG2 everytime I watch Live TV. Anyone else have that issue?
I got Roku working. The Fire TV 4k stick seems to work better. Skipping (commercials, etc.) seems to always buffer on the Roku. Also, it takes longer to initiate a Live Channel on the Roku.
