Giving very serious consideration to dumping Sky Q (UK) given costs increasingly annually, general dissatisfaction and issues with their recording capability. Our main use of live TV are the channels that are freely available anyway (BBC1/2, ITV, Ch4, Ch5) and on rare occasion Sky Atlantic (but I’d forego the latter). That said, I don’t want to make the jump to another solution if we 1. lose 4k or 2. end up with a really painful user experience for scheduling/recording/watching recorded content.
Current fixed/low/no cost options would be to either use the built in Freeview tuner in our Samsung QN900B with an added hard drive (not a great user experience) or to add a tuner and use Plex. We already use Plex pretty heavily for downloaded content, so I’m familiar with the playback capability in that regard.
I’m looking for general experience of others based on the above. How do you find the user experience? Any hardware to recommend, or avoid? Anyone done the same and love it/regret it?
Fwiw, my Plex server sits on an M1 Mac mini. Very few issues with it generally speaking, so would probably stick with that platform for the foreseeable, providing it doesn’t block use of a tuner.
I have recently made the jump for the same reasons. My main goals to achieve partner approval was to be able to record and watch those recordings in any room of the house, which made freeview/freesat boxes a no go.
Mine is a complicated setup and took a lot of work to get configured, but I’m happy with it. There are always a few quirks and annoyances using plex over Sky but for the £100 a month I’m saving, I don’t mind.
For starters, you won’t get 4k in a setup like this as none of the free to air channels broadcast in 4K (Yet)
For terrestrial tv, I have an aerial in my loft which is plugged into a raspberry pi with a tv hat and a couple of usb xbox DVB-T tuners. This is running tvheadendand and tvhproxy so plex see’s it as a HDHomerun Connect.
I only set that up as a proof of concept before spending money on the setup but it has been working fine for me so haven’t bothered paying for a HDHomerun.
If you want to go down this route without the setup hassle then get a HDHomerun Connect Duo or Quatro (depending on how many channels you want to watch/record at once)
I also have an IPTV subscription for my Sky channels. They provide an m3u file which I pass through Xteve which again appears to plex as a HDHomerun. It takes a fair amount of time to setup but is worth it. I also have the added bonus of some overseas channels that show the 3pm football games.
The TV guide is nice and easy to use for anyone in the family. Apart from a few teething issues with recordings, it all works pretty well and are happy with the switch.
One immediate question… what provider are you using for IPTV? Didn’t even know this was a thing, and I now see there are quite a lot of providers - some looking more questionable than others!
Also a clarification, we receive Freesat via a communal system (block of flats), but I assume that’s largely irrelevant as it appears HDHomerun will do the job. Confusingly if you look at Freesat’s website they talk about a 4k box, but I assume it simply has the capability but the content isn’t yet available in 4k (unless on demand)?
All IPTV providers are questionable as it isn’t exactly legal. I think it’s against Plex forum rules to link you to one.
HDHomerun only works for a TV aerial (DVB-T), not a Satellite (DVB-S). I’m hoping they come out with one in the future.
The Freesat 4K box can output 4K but none of the live TV is broadcast in 4K. It has ondemand services like iPlayer installed, which does do 4K though
Ah ok, that explains re IPTV. I’ll do my research. I’m inclined to leave the sky content for now anyway and see if we miss it. I guess there’s also NowTV for some of it at least.
I see there are other hardware options for the UK, does any support Freesat? We have both feeds here fortunately, but I find the Freesat far more reliable.
You may be able to find a DVB-S tuner that works for Freesat. I did briefly look into the VBox and Enigma2, but didn’t go deep down that rabbit hole. At the moment my raspberry pi DVB-T setup was cheap and is doing the job well so have left it as is for now.
I’m hoping that a DVB-S version of the HDHomerun is released in the future but don’t know if they actually plan to do this
Cheers. I can see the vbox under community supported, but comments imply there are issues with guide data (unclear how old that is). May further investigate the terrestrial approach.
This is the Plex provided EPG. Multiple Tuners is fine for Plex EPG but you can’t mix Plex and xmltv guide sources (unsure why)
Problem is that Plex guide data doesn’t support all regions, so as a workaround I have another instance of Plex running on my NAS for unsupported regions with xmltv guide. This solution isn’t ideal though as the NAS doesn’t have much transcoding power.
I am trying to match the quality of the Plex EPG with xmltv files so I can can bring it all under one roof but have hit a pain point there and not heard anything back on my post here
Just checking as I’ve concluded to move ahead with this. If I add a tuner to Plex, does Plex then handle the recording and playback, presumably using the existing hard drive (s) I already have on my Plex server?
Wow quick turn around! HDHR was out of stock for around 6 months until recently. Yeah it has it’s quirks and is more high maintenance than sky, but you can save a lot of money and watch your recordings anywhere
True, but hopefully worth it in the long run. I remain confused with how our communal building system is configured, as it appears the same signals (Freeview AND Freesat) are all coming through the same wiring. The HDHR has been able to tune all channels when connected to the Freesat port, but the HD channels end up at 5000+. Fortunately they can be remapped in Plex!
Do you know if there are other iOS clients/applications that can integrate and display live TV? The HDHR native app is terrible IMO, and not everyone in the household may want to use Plex for live TV.
