I am asking this question because I have a HDHomeRun Prime. The frustrating thing is that most video comes in as 1080i and Plex will just pass this through and most devices like the Fire Stick has either no deinterlacing or really poor deinterlacing. I can get Plex to transcode if I drop the quality down to 720p but at any of the 1080p options, Plex will still choose to pass through raw video. When Plex transcodes you don’t get the poor quality since Plex seems to be deinterlacing in the transcoder. I noticed this because you can actually get the recordings to transcode at 1080p unlike live TV. If transcoding by default on live TV doesn’t get implemented I’d at least like to be able to choose to transcode at 1080p while watching live TV.
I think there is a way to do that but it might not be intended. The fire stick (and other Plex clients) will let you set the max quality for content being played back on it. When I had a fire stick, it seemed like this setting also applied to the LiveTV stream. Here, I am attaching the setting on the Plex Web client because I don’t have the fire stick anymore. The downside from what I remember is that when I used this, I lost the ability to watch a currently recording show ‘from the beginning’.
try setting h264 max level to 2.2. i did this and it forces plex to transcode live tv to the fire stick. now all my channels play perfectly (before anything in h264 codec/avc was very blocky and choppy. no discernable loss of quality i can find and no buffering (server is running off an i7 3.4ghz passmark ~10k fyi).
