Just got Live TV and DVR setup on my system the other day and am not very happy with the playback performance. Quality is great once it settles down and stops buffering and pausing. Trying to FF or RW will send it into Buffer mode. It’s painful to operate.
I would love to reduce the quality of the recorded shows, but it appears that:
TV tuner is not capable, but I wouldn’t expect it to be.
PMS has no settings for DVR quality; or at least I can’t find them.
Client:
XBOX One
Wired gigabit
PMS: 1.11.2.4772
Transcoding directory located in a RAM disk. (i.e. pretty fast storage)
Media storage located on NAS: (QNAP TS-453A, 16GB RAM)
Server:
Intel XEON (6 Core)
16GB RAM
6 disk Raid 5
Hauppauge XBOX TV tuner
Wired gigabit
I really really want this to work out, but so far I’m almost ready to move the tuner back onto the XBOX. The Guide is much better than what Plex can provide. (hopefully that can get fixed at some point)
Just messed around a bit in the Web player, and ran into a “not enough disk space to convert or transcode” error. I don’t remember exactly what it said. Maybe that’s my issue. The RAM disk I use for the transcoding directory is not very big, maybe 7GB. I’ll try removing it and letting it follow the default dir location where it’ll have plenty of room.
Im also having issues, last night installed Hauppauge quad HD tuner. Seems to play fine on web player, and on iphone, but has bad buffering issues with the plex xbone app. Both xbone and PMS wired gigabit as is yours.
The Transcode directory changes I made did nothing. It was horrible to the point that I couldn’t stand watching the Olympics. Trying to skip past the commercials was an exercise in futility. The large jump (up/down) on the left XBOX controller stick worked well, fyi, but right/left which I believe is 30 seconds did not. Buffering is all I got.
So these things are encoded at roughly 12Mbps, where as most of the other content I watch is from 4-8 Mbps.
How do the amazon firestick or roku perform in comparison? I can’t believe that a gaming console with a thousand times the performance would do so poorly. I don’t want another streaming device, the xbox should do.
I have a Shield TV and here is my LiveTV experience. If I am watching a channel that comes from my cable provider as MPEG2, skipping back and forth usually takes 3-4 seconds (frame frozen, no sounds then 3-4 seconds pass then video and audio resume). If I am watching a channel that comes in as H264 (I use comcast in Seattle and all channels except for the broadcast ones which come in as MPEG2, come in as H264) then skipping forward is down to 1 second. In both situations the Shield Plex client shows “DirectPlay” when live tv is streaming.
IMO even 1 second is too much (still audio cuts out etc).
@tachtevrenidis said:
…
IMO even 1 second is too much (still audio cuts out etc).
I completely agree. It’s a terrible experience that needs to get fixed… especially being a Plex Pass feature.
I don’t have your equipment, so not sure if my quality settings will help…
Settings > Server > Live TV & DVR > Little gear icon next to your tuner name
In that dialogue box I have a Transcoder Quality dropdown menu. If you don’t have it, fiddle in that area looking for other options.
@AmazingRando24 said:
I don’t have your equipment, so not sure if my quality settings will help…
Settings > Server > Live TV & DVR > Little gear icon next to your tuner name
In that dialogue box I have a Transcoder Quality dropdown menu. If you don’t have it, fiddle in that area looking for other options.
I have already poked around, and those settings are contextual based on your tuner. The Hauppaugge tuner I use has nothing to configure, yet an HDHomeRun EXTEND does.
AmazingRando24, I stand corrected. I’ve set it to Transcode now, so we’ll see how it does with playback of today’s recorded Olympics events. Fingers crossed.
Generally speaking a tuner is simply going to allow you to get the video stream as is from your source. So a ATSC tuner card will normally right to a .ts file using either a .h263 or h.264 video codec. The ATSC spec also allows up to a 19mbps Bitrate be sent OTA. I think there is work on a updated spec to push that even higher. Your system appears to have fairly robust specs though.
You can turn on that flag, or get a hd homerun extend which includes a transcoder in the hardware. Allot of folks like myself simply use post processing to reduce the quality or convert the stream after it is recorded.
As far as seek time, I agree having everything be instant would be nice, but I feel is also a pipe dream. There are many factors that play into how well seeking in a video works. All of them work against having zero delay. I just tried this on my shield and and after the buffer built a bit I was able to move around find and without hesitation
Enabling the Transcoding option for the tuner actually increased the bitrate. This recording today ended up at 18Mbps. I don’t know what more I can say about this, it’s sort of ridiculous.
I just tested this latest recording on the Xbox, and then on my android phone. Completely different experience. The phone is awesome in comparison. Skipping 30 seconds or 5 minutes only takes a couple seconds of buffering. On the Xbox, 10+, and then a few stutters more for the next 15 or so seconds.
To answer an earlier question, I have excellent experiences on the Roku in this regard. I normally avoid the Xbox like the plague based on how I know the Roku devices to perform by comparison.
If you can spare $30 in your budget to test, grab the new updated Roku Express. If it doesn’t meet the need, you should have one anyway. They just rock.
OK, bought the top dog Roku box thingy, twas a few bucks off regular price so what the heck, why not! I can wire it in to the network too, which I prefer to do with anything streaming.
I think you’ll be happier. None of this is instant, so it’s a matter of mitigating the issue. I think the Roku just handles things better, which always surprises me, as the Xbox trumps it in specs.
