I’m looking to finally cut the cord and have some questions.
I currently have a subscription to DirecTV with two set top boxes. One upstairs TV and one downstairs. I have an off air antenna that gives me off air television stations to a number of other rooms without cable stations.
What I’m looking to do is have both cable and off air stations available to both televisions for the most cost effective way.
My Plex server running co-resident on my NAS. On the television downstairs, I have a media server connected in the form of a PC that I use the Plex client to watch content on my plex server.
What I’m trying to do is have cable stations and off-air stations integrated into Plex on both televisions. My assumption is that my Plex server would be my whole home DVR.
I saw that the HDHomeRun Prime box with a cable card will give me cable channel access. It looks like the HDHomeRun Quatro would allow me to plug my off-air antenna in. Do I need two separate boxes to get cable and off air channels or can I get both off air and cable stations with just the Quatro?
With my upstairs television, I don’t have a media server connected so how can I get both the off air and cable channels to show up on it in the most cost effective way?
I saw a few threads that sounded like Plex cannot integrate both off air and cable channels with the guide? Is there a work around here?
Just a small note: you’re not ‘cutting the cord’ if you’re still paying for cable channels You’re just stopping the use of the cable company’s devices for the channels (except for the CableCard).
The HDHomeRun Prime definitely cannot access over-the-air channels, and the Quattro can’t hold a CableCard, so if you want both sources you’ll need both types of tuners.
Something else to keep in mind is that Plex (currently) doesn’t natively support more than one guide data source per server. That is, you can’t select a cable TV guide for your Prime and an OTA guide for your Connect Quatro. There are workarounds, but none of them are particularly elegant:
Use a virtual tuner (such as xTeVe) to consolidate both tuners and use a single guide.
Set up a second Plex Media Server so that you can use a different guide data source for each.
If your cable provider carries all your local OTA channels’ content, use that as the guide source and just map its guide data to your OTA tuner as well.
Of those options, I think number 3 is the probably the easiest, assuming all the channels you care about have guide data.
There’s a fourth option which involves tricking Plex into adding two different guide sources by simultaneously adding the two tuners at the same time, from different clients. I’m not sure how much I’d trust that option though.
So my assumption is Plex can see both the HDHomeRun Prime and the Quatro devices simultaneously.
How do you map guide data to the OTA tuner? Is there a page you can point me to? I’m assuming once you map the local stations guide to the OTA tuner, can you DVR from both the HDHomeRun Prime and Connect Quatro to Plex because they are merged at the guide?
Also, in terms of accessing plex from my upstairs television. What’s a recommended solution to use. I don’t want to build a full PC client as that will be quite expensive.
Is there a better alternative than using HDHomeRun Prime with a cable card like YouTube / Hulu etc… and can those integrate with Plex? Just trying to see the best options here.
The list on the left shows the channels detected by the tuner and the list on the right has the channels from the guide you picked. If you enable a channel in the left-hand list, you can select what channel’s guide data is used for it in the right-hand list. So, if you set your Prime up first, and choose your cable provider’s guide data when you configure it, you’ll see those channels list as options when you set up your OTA tuner after. Assuming your cable provider carries most/all of your locals, you’ll be able to map its guide data.
As an example, assume your local, OTA NBC affiliate is on channel 4.1, and that your cable provider carries it, but on channel 204. When it’s time to configure the OTA tuner in Plex, you’d enable channel 4.1 on the left, but then select channel 204 as the guide channel on the right.
There are many options here. There are folks on the forums who are fans of Roku devices and others who prefer Android TV devices (the Nvidia Shield TV is very popular). I personally use an Apple TV 4K; my personal opinion is that it has one of the best looking and functional Plex apps.
There are no third-party TV services which integrate with Plex natively.
I attempted this for a while when Silicon Dust tried their cable over internet experiment. I tried using a local cable company guide to bridge the gap between local antenna channels and SD’s generic internet cable feeds.
The problem was my antenna had sub-channels that none of the local cable companies carried so I had to write those off.
Fortunately ChannelsDVR and Emby handle the multiple EPG setup just fine. I have no idea why Plex hasn’t fixed this problem here two years later.
If you’re going to use a cable feed, it will really be easiest to just use it for everything, including the channels you are also able to receive over the air. I use an HDHomeRun Prime in this fashion and it works quite well.
So I did some more digging and it appears that the HDHomeRun Prime is headed for the end of its life. The original 3 tuner version ran out of parts. They were going to release the Prime 6 and that is completely dead now as I read a thread that the guys who work at Silicon Dust clearly stated. They are going to release a last run of the HDHomeRun Prime 3 because they found some old parts, but that is not a compelling path to go down knowing it’s a end of life platform.
The question I have is what is an alternative to get cable stations (e.g. CNN, EPSN etc…) meaning a package of cable channels like we get from Comcast or AT&T/DirecTV into Plex where we can use Plex as the whole home DVR?
I know there’s YouTube TV, Hulu, etc… but those don’t appear to integrate with Plex. I looked at the Plex Live TV stations but those are obscure channels not mainstream like CNN, ESPN etc… I don’t want to pay for a per channel subscription. I’m looking to basically replace DirecTV and be able to DVR shows just like I do with my current service.
I bought a used HDHomeRun Prime 3 (via an eBay seller) because in spite of all of that it was still the best option available. Looked at the other way… there are no great options available.
I believe there is at least one tuner which supports CableCards and is in production and is usable with Plex but is only supported in Microsoft Windows.
If your cable provider provides unencrypted non-premium channels, you have more options because there are lots of ‘cable compatible’ tuners out there. Unfortunately many of the cable providers encrypt everything, so that’s not a practical option for a lot of users.
I just read an article published this last week basically saying that CableCard is going to go away because the FCC just removed the mandate and of course the last thing the cable companies want to do is support a way for us to be able to get out of their set top box lock.
I’m in Comcast / Xfinity area and I’m positive they encrypt everything.
So it sounds like Plex has no alternative solution to get cable channels into Plex other than using an HDHomeRun with Cablecard?
So is the only alternative is to get a subscription like YouTube TV, Hulu, Sling, etc… and use an Apple TV or any other media client directly
Yes, you’ve got it. The HDHomeRun Prime works great and is not terribly expensive, but it’s not a currently manufactured or supported product.
There is some evidence that the Hauppage WinTV-DCR devices may be usable with Plex (MythTV supports them), since they are probably the same hardware as the HDHR uses, but it’s also not a supported configuration.
But the Channels DVR with TV Everywhere is a competitor to Plex I thought. I have a Plex Lifetime subscription and have all the rest of my media in Plex so was hoping there was a solution that worked with Plex to get cable stations
Sorry, I could have been more clear: I mean they may consider using the TV Everywhere concept that Channels is using, not that they’d use Channels itself.
Right so being that plex does not have Channels DVR with TV Everywhere supported. HDHomeRun Prime is not supported or manufactured. It looks like Hauppage WinTV-DCR is also a Cablecard box and only has 2 tuners.
So there’s no plan or talk about how Plex plans to bring cable stations into the platform?
Yep that’s correct, but we have no idea about the future, perhaps Plex will build a similar concept inside their DVR software to allow for streaming channels, during this stretch where CableCards are eliminated (which may take a while). But that leads to your next question…
Nothing public that I’m aware of. But Plex doesn’t publicize roadmaps so we wouldn’t know until some kind of announcement, even if they were working on it.
I was just looking at the Live TV area and they have a bunch of stations, but they are all outlier stations vs. the mainstream cable TV stations (e.g. CNN, ESPN). It would be great if they would expand on this and offer all the stations we can get with Cablecard or YouTube TV etc…
So with Channels DVR with TV Everywhere, does it actually work to get cable stations. Do they offer local stations or do I still need an off air box like an HDHomeRun Quatro? I’m looking to see if that’s an option to get rid of DirecTV.
Full disclosure: I don’t use Channels DVR because they’ve shunned Roku, even though it’s supported MPEG2 for a couple generations.
My understanding is that they essentially capture the live streaming feed for any cable channel that participates in TV Everywhere. As a user, you need to be logged into TV Everywhere with your cable account, and of course only channels approved for your provider are accessible. IIRC, there are some limitations, like only stereo sound available.
I haven’t personally used it though. I just researched it when I was debating my DVR options. I’m sure some others here do use it, they might be able to answer in detail if they see this.
I would need to have a subscription to TV Everywhere it’s $80 per year. You need to have a cable tv streaming subscription (e.g. xfinity streaming which gives me cable and local stations) for $xx per year. I can then install the Channels Plus DVR application on my NAS which is part of the $80 per year and at that point I would have exactly what I was hoping I could have in Plex?
You’re just stopping the use of the cable company’s devices for the channels (except for the CableCard).
