First, thanks for adding support for more tuners! I can now test out the DVR and live TV without purchasing anything (I’m using the Digital TV Tuner for Xbox One from Hauppauge.)
Setup was simple, and although I had to run the guide download twice to get it to complete, I was able to record the Amazing Race finale this week. But when I went to play it on my Roku 3 or Premier plus it will not direct play or stream. Okay, it should transcode fine right? Wrong - my i7 quad core, 16GB RAM server could not keep up with the 1080p 13 Mbs file. lots of buffering and restarting.
I can probably set the device to only play 1080p 4Mbs . Or I can buy a homerun extend and have it do the transcoding in hardware during recording to solve that.
But if I am going to pay more money, I’d like to know know - when we will be able to watch a recording before it completes? Being able to watch a program 20 minutes into recording it or pause live TV is a crucial feature and DVR “Table stakes” IMO. And this ability is something that can differentiate plex’s DVR from a program like Sonarr.
You can do this today, with iOS and Android TV. Any platform that supports live TV you will be able to watch a recording in progress.
I’m concerned you couldn’t play the DVR recording though…
In your tuner confguration there should be an option to ‘transcode on the fly’ (on my phone, don’t remember exactly where) which means it’ll automatically convert the mpeg2 recording to h264, which should help you playing them back on other devices. Can you try tht and see if it helps?
Where do I look to watch my recordings in progress? PMS created my [scheduled] recording in my TV Shows directory under a folder named “.grab”. Once the recording was complete, the files was moved to up one directory to the TV Shows folder and then appeared under my Library which I could then watch it on any device.
Thanks for responding. I will look for the transcode on the fly option, in my tuner configuration.
@keithah said:
You can do this today, with iOS and Android TV. Any platform that supports live TV you will be able to watch a recording in progress.
I’m concerned you couldn’t play the DVR recording though…
In your tuner confguration there should be an option to ‘transcode on the fly’ (on my phone, don’t remember exactly where) which means it’ll automatically convert the mpeg2 recording to h264, which should help you playing them back on other devices. Can you try tht and see if it helps?
@keithah HOW DO YOU DO THAT? (sorry for the caps, just excited). I am pretty sure what @Alitchy is referring to is this. You start recording an hour-long show at 8:00pm, let’s say, and at 8:15pm, you want to playback what has been recorded already. While you are watching, it is recording more of the show, so if you time it right you can start watching a show that is currently being recorded x minutes after it started and through skipping the commercials end watching the show at its scheduled end time. That means Plex, in this case, only let’s you fast forward till you are caught up with the live stream and you can of course go back to the beginning of the show. Does Plex do this today? What I noticed is that, while a show is recording, you can go to ‘Live TV’ find the same show and watch it. The live stream has not awareness of the stream being recorded so you just start watching Live TV as if you were not recording it. Plus you can’t FF or RW or pause. Am I close?
The good news seem to be that in scenario 2, Plex reuses the tuner that is already recording the show, so while you are recording, AND watching live, only one tuner shows being utilized. Kudos for that!
@tachtevrenidis said: @keithah HOW DO YOU DO THAT? (sorry for the caps, just excited). I am pretty sure what @Alitchy is referring to is this. You start recording an hour-long show at 8:00pm, let’s say, and at 8:15pm, you want to playback what has been recorded already. While you are watching, it is recording more of the show, so if you time it right you can start watching a show that is currently being recorded x minutes after it started and through skipping the commercials end watching the show at its scheduled end time. That means Plex, in this case, only let’s you fast forward till you are caught up with the live stream and you can of course go back to the beginning of the show. Does Plex do this today? What I noticed is that, while a show is recording, you can go to ‘Live TV’ find the same show and watch it. The live stream has not awareness of the stream being recorded so you just start watching Live TV as if you were not recording it. Plus you can’t FF or RW or pause. Am I close?
Thanks for articulating my point better than I could
I’m concerned you couldn’t play the DVR recording though…
In your tuner confguration there should be an option to ‘transcode on the fly’ (on my phone, don’t remember exactly where) which means it’ll automatically convert the mpeg2 recording to h264, which should help you playing them back on other devices. Can you try tht and see if it helps?
Follow up to this point - I successfully recorded Meet the Press (only so much HD available on a Sunday morning) and the Roku 3 was able to direct play it, so looks like the on the fly transcoding worked! Now this show was only 720p, but I have some Golf on CBS to record this afternoon. I’m sure it will be 1080p and higher bitrate, that will be the better test. I’ll report back my results.
I do have a question about the transcoding used by the DVR, is the quality of the transcode configured in the “Transcoder quality” setting under Server, settings, transcoder?
We don’t have timeshifting yet. So you hit record on something, and then at 8:15 want to watch it starting at 8pm, we can’t do that. We are coming out with timeshifting! We wanted to get it in this release, but it didn’t make the cut.
Glad to hear transcode on the fly helped! The ‘Transcoder quality’ you see is what you’re telling PMS to transcode it too (or the Extend, if youre using one)
We don’t have timeshifting yet. So you hit record on something, and then at 8:15 want to watch it starting at 8pm, we can’t do that. We are coming out with timeshifting! We wanted to get it in this release, but it didn’t make the cut.
Glad to hear transcode on the fly helped! The ‘Transcoder quality’ you see is what you’re telling PMS to transcode it too (or the Extend, if youre using one)
Awesome that timeshifting is on the horizon! I’m looking forward to that almost as much as live TV on Roku.
Can you clarify where I am “telling PMS to transcode it too?”
The Plex DVR settings are very limited, as are the Plex device settings for my WinTV-HVR-955Q. I don’t see anywhere to indicate what it should be transcoded too. There is also nowhere to set that in the recording options of the program.
In the servers transcoder settings, I have transcoder quality set to “make my CPU hurt.” Does this decide the quality of the “on the fly” recording transcoding?
@ASiDiE No timeshifting that I can find anywhere, nor have I seen it specficially mentioned as a feature they have added. Going to miss it duing football season where I would use this feature A LOT.
@n9yty said: @ASiDiE No timeshifting that I can find anywhere, nor have I seen it specficially mentioned as a feature they have added. Going to miss it duing football season where I would use this feature A LOT.
What client are you using? Timeshift is currently available in the iOS and Android (TV and Mobile) clients.
@n9yty said: @ASiDiE No timeshifting that I can find anywhere, nor have I seen it specficially mentioned as a feature they have added. Going to miss it duing football season where I would use this feature A LOT.
What client are you using? Timeshift is currently available in the iOS and Android (TV and Mobile) clients.
Yes but that timeshifting only is able to pause live tv and can only rewind up to the point you started WATCHING the Live TV stream not recording. In other words YOU CAN NOT START WATCHING FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE RECORDING WHILE STILL RECORDING. That to me (and most other users) is a super important feature that is essential to a proper DVR.
@jayz78 You’re right that there’s been no mention of this anywhere, but on Android TV for me, when a program is actively recording and you start a new Live TV session for the same program, you can rewind to the beginning of the recording.
I’m on the 6.4.x beta for Android TV, and I did see mention somewhere that if you start a Live TV session for something that’s recording, it only consumes one tuner, so it’s obviously close. I think it will be in the public releases by football season.
