Some Live TV channels are interlaced and we would benefit to have an option to deinterlace Live TV. This option can be - experimental - and hidden as appropriate if the Plex Devs believe it to be too troublesome. But I am sure that this feature will become a prominent feature once implemented.
Any form of deinterlace would be appreciated, even frame doubling - with appropriate performance warnings.
No-one uses live tv? no-one has interlaced content issues? This affect Fire TV sticks.
I too would love this. Emby pvr deinterlaces on the server with live TV making the aftv products worthwhile again.
However, the Plex interface is superior
You need to vote for it. Or it might not happen.
You say Emby does deinterlace? I’ve not seen it recently but when I did try it, my interlaced TV feed was not changed. I’ll check it again. Also, I agree about their interface, it’s pretty rubbish for live TV. I’m not convinced that Plex had it right just yet either.
Just tried Emby and yes, an option to deinterlace HD sources now exists (SD was there last time I checked). And the TV guide has improved by a lot. I’ve just spent the best part of the evening playing with it. I’m happy with that. I have both systems setup anyway.
Oh, and Chromecast functionality is amazing. I love what they’ve done. Using the mobile phone as a remote is great. Only downside is it’s a bit slow.
Fire TV stick works brilliant. I’m sold on that.
Yeah, being able to cast live TV anywhere is a game changer.
Just voted.
This is very important to me
+1 — this is exactly my situation, and it’s still very relevant in 2026.
My local DVB-C HD channels are H.264 broadcast as interlaced 1080i. On the Plex Samsung (Tizen) TV app I can enable “Force Direct Play”, which sends the raw interlaced stream to the TV and lets it deinterlace in hardware — perfectly smooth, zero server load.
But on the iOS app and the Web client there is no equivalent option, so Plex falls back to a server-side deinterlace/transcode. My server (Synology DS416play, Celeron N3060) cannot deinterlace live HD in real time, so Live TV constantly buffers on those clients — even on the local gigabit LAN, so it’s not a bandwidth issue.
The key point: I loaded the exact same tuner stream into VLC on the same iPhone and Mac, and it plays perfectly by deinterlacing on the device. So the client hardware is fully capable — only the Plex iOS/Web client forces a server transcode.
Please bring a “Force Direct Play” / client-side deinterlace option to the iOS and Web players too, matching what the TV app already does. It would make interlaced Live TV usable for everyone running Plex on a low-power NAS.
