Oh, by the way, answering one of your original questions - set the encoding quality inside of Plex. The setting on the Extend itself only controls those apps that don’t have settings of their own
Thank you @JamminR, you’ve been very patient and have answered in great detail my questions.
I guess I’m still holding out that Live TV will work with my currently unsupported devices and this NAS. My phone and the web app can both play a recorded show, which appears to be H264 in the MPG2TS container. So I don’t understand what is different between Live and Recorded other than in the programming it is treated differently even if the video and container are the same.
I believe the difference is this -
Live TV your NAS is sucking a RAW TS stream over the network and writing it to disk as fast as it can so IO on your network IO on your disk very little CPU but high disk and network and than it has to read that same file it just wrote and transcode it i.e. use heavy CPU and again more disk IO to write the newly transcoded stream followed by sending this out to the client so more network IO and again disk IO to read that stream to the client.
A recorded show on the other hand is much simpler, NAS has file already on disk reads it and sends it to client, so it can buffer much easier before sending to the client.
There is so much less overhead when the client just requests a file that already exists… (Just my thoughts)
Oh, good eye @nokdim - that too.
I forgot LiveTV now also has time shifting.
Double-whammy for a lower powered NAS.
I wondering if this would work. I don’t record or watch a lot of Live TV so I don’t know that I want to invest in a more powerful NAS or a fully dedicated PC for the PMS. But I do have an older Hackintosh that I could use. I was thinking I could run a PMS on this with the DVR/Live TV and take that function out of the PMS on my weak NAS.
What do you think? Would I be able to use the same library between 2 PMSs? And have one doing the live TV / DVR but the other could be for streaming the content I already have that works today.
The Plex Media Server library just points to a disk storage location. I see no reason why you could not have 2 systems both storing recorded content on the same drives. I would suggest doing the recording on the Hackintosh and then use a script that runs every 30 or 60 minutes to move the recorded files to your NAS.
