I’m a HDHomeRun Record user who started on Windows Media Center, and one of my main gripes about HDHRRecord is that I can only record using EPG data. There’s no ability to hit the record button and start a recording from a live TV stream.
This causes me to miss shows when EPG data doesn’t line up - even if I’m there to see the show is playing, there’s no way I can start it recording manually and it really pisses me off,. WMC used to have this function, which is analogous to freaking VHS recorders, and I can’t for the life of me understand why such a basic function would be missing from HDHR.
I just read the entire FAQ for the Plex DVR and I noticed it also uses EPG data to record, but there was no mention of starting a recording of Live TV manually.
Is that something you can do with Plex DVR? Are there any HDHR-Record converts here who would like to chime in about why they switched to Plex?
I don’t know about all the Plex clients but at least on Plex Media Player for Windows you can hit the record button while watching. It does use the EPG to know when the program is over and stop recording. There is no option to ignore the EPG and setup a recording of say 7 to 11 pm on channel X.
so, to clarify, I can’t set up times to record (regardless of what EPG says - so EPG could change and throw that off, which happens to me on HDHR, too) -
but at least if I were home I could start something recording while watching it, no matter what it is? (e.g. if HDHR thinks it recorded something already it will NOT record it, which has also made me miss stuff - in fact, just last night).
With the clients getting a new interface I wasn’t sure which ones had a record button on the live screen. Android mobile doesn’t but Roku and now Apple TV do.
I would be using Windows 10 or Ubuntu most likely for front end.
I forget, is there a client -> server model for the DVR like HDHR? If so, could I run PMS on FreeBSD? That’s what I’ve always used in the past but it’s been a few VM hosts ago since I’ve set it up in my homelab…
Window, MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Most major NAS’s and Docker installs. Debian/Ubuntu would be the most recommended, HW transcoding under FreeBSD takes some work. It is Client - Server model, there is a Plex Media Player for Windows, Roku, IOS, Android. There is a community build of PMP for Linux I haven’t tried but you can use a browser for media 1080p or less.
TV is MPEG2 and to direct stream you need a client that has MPEG2 codecs, PMP for Windows, Roku, Shield, Android otherwise it will be transcoded to h.264 which needs a cpu passmark of 2000 per stream or Hardware GPU. Intel QSV is the most supported option and currently the only option on Linux. The CPU should be Haswell or later but preferably Broadwell or later to yield the best results. If you are even thinking about 4K then you are in the Lake series.
Space. Recordings are 6-9GB per hour and there is an experimental option to convert to h.264 on the fly to save space if your system can handle it.
That is some great info! Very comprehensive and helpful. It’s all coming back to me now (It’s been like 3 years since I’ve seriously used plex).
Hm. Doesn’t Linux support mpeg2 using ffmpeg?
We usually only watch 1 or 2 things at once, only two of us and only one TV in the house. Everything is capped at 1080p through our two HDHR primes which is fine because I think most digicable broadcast is still 720p anyway.
Now that I think about it, I don’t think I can do QSV because there’s no iGPU in my E5-2650v4. Probably just have to throw a few vcores at a dedicated Ubuntu server 18.04 Plex VM, or run it on my LTSC 2019 VM with quadro p400 GPU passthrough.
But I don’t think I need to do transcoding anyway. I’m not doing any transcoding right now with the HDHR setup AFAIK , I think it just plays the same MPEG2 streams it records.
The server is on ESXi 6.7 and we use a Windows LTSC Thinkpad T520 (sandy bridge) for the TV viewer, which has been just fine for 1080p. Looks like its i5-2520m cpumark is 3590.
So I guess I could worry about transcoding if I wanted to downgrade to viewing a Fire stick or some crap like that, but I think that’d be kind of a step backwards anyway (one that we’d have to purchase, at that).
Edit: Actually now that I think about it, my girlfriend uses her iPad for streaming, for that we might want transcoding, hm? Right now she just sticks to web streaming services for it and watches any recordings on the TV since HDHR app has a tendency to lag.
E5-2650v4 is more than sufficient to handle 1 - 2 streams even if it has to transcode.
Plex Media Player (download from Plex) with the MPEG2 codec from Windows store works well for direct play. Keep in mind that the Plex client-server approach writes the HDHR stream to disk on the server before it relays to the client whereas HDHR apps just stream straight from device to client. The Plex way gives you that record while watching ability but introduces a 5 to 10 second startup penalty.
