I have a surveillance camera system DVR recorder that has HDMI output ( VGA as well but I’d rather stay all digital ).
If I add an HDMI capture card to my PC Plex server, can I stream this HDMI source to any device and watch the input live?
This solves many problems:
Viewers for my system are almost non-existent whereas Plex is so widely supported on just about everything. Also, it saves me from having to run cable around my house to each television in order to see my One Main high resolution camera.
How can Plex take a digital signal from a cable tv box and stream it to all devices with the plex app… but it cannot take my own hdmi source and do the same?
cablebox/OTA tv tuners do not convert to/from hdmi, they receive/decode the raw mpeg stream and redirect it to something that also understands it.
an OTA stream is just a high bitrate mpeg2 transport stream.
cable/ota content is data streams
vs
hdmi is like an encrypted antenna or coax cable or ethernet
completely different components of a video system
if your hdmi capture card can output to an ATSC stream in a compatible format as one of the supported tv tuners, then might be possible.
what would be the problem is plex would have to recognize (your capture would have to emulate) a compatible tuner (like an hd homerun or whatever).
then you would need some kind of custom guide, so the plex would understand to tune to ‘channel 2’ or whatever your captured stream was on.
The odds of getting (and keeping) all that working together, are long.
but the simple answer was provided above by Otto.
or if you can find a compatible tv tuner that has an HDMI input and will output that stream like a regular tv channel, that might work. But good luck finding a plex compatible tuner, with HDMI input.
A much more likely solution would be for your capture card to dump the streams to a plex compatible container on a video library (not movie not tv), then your users could watch non live recordings of your captures.
