I’m having problems with the DVR recording quality on my Plex Media Server. It’s running on Mac running OSX 10.10.5 (Yosemite) that has a 3.41Ghz Core i7 Proc and 32GB Ram (it’s an older Mac but it souped up).
The problem I’m having is that the TS file that is produced when I use the DVR feature is unplayable. When I put the raw file into VLC player it plays very poorly - stutters and very pixelated. So I know it’s the not a player issue, but a recorder issue.
I have tried setting the Device Settings (in PMS for my HDHomeRun PRIME) to both Transcode and Off for the “Convert Video While Recording” setting and neither makes any improvements.
I guess I’m wondering if 1) Does my Mac have enough processing power to handle the DVR function, and 2) Are there any optimization tricks I can do to get the DVR to actually record correctly?
Stuttering and Pixelation are usually signs of weak signal. Since this is a Prime that means cable card, was this previously working with some other software?
What is the actual CPU in your Mac? TV streams need 2000 to 3000 passmark per stream when transcoding which can occur depending on the client you use ie browser.
Yeah it is a cable card set up. When I watch live TV it streams just fine so definitely not a signal strength issue. I just ran a Geekbench test on my CPU (Intel Core i7-2600K @ 3.41Ghz) and it scored 3418 Single-Core Score and 11722 Multi-Core Score.
Is PMS Multi-core enabled? So the CPU is a few years old, but shouldn’t it be sufficient to save and transcode content? I watch the PMS content on my Apple TV most of the time.
On the passmark scale that would be 8435 which is fine for 3 streams. The way Plex handles Live TV/DVR is to write the stream to disk and then read that back out to the client. If Live streams aren’t pixelated but recorded shows are then something else is going on. Usually the hangup is the client doesn’t do MPEG2 which is the native TS format and has to convert to h.264. The Plex Media Player on Apple TV should do ok with this. I’m just going to cut and paste from the generic response.
Please recreate the problem, with DEBUG logging only (not VERBOSE) enabled.
Start playback
Play for 10 seconds
Stop playback
Wait 30 seconds for buffers to get to disk.
Settings - Server - Troubleshooting - Download Logs
Attach the ZIP file it gives you here please.
Log are attached - thanks for checking into this for me! I just started watching live tv for 10 seconds and then stopped it, waited and downloaded the logs - hope that is correct!
First of all, the client doesn’t do any converting (aka transcoding), that’s done on the server side.
Second of all, Plex Media Player is the name of the computer version of the Plex app. On the Apple TV, it’s just known as the Plex app for/on the Apple TV.
And finally, the Apple TV doesn’t do either TS (container) or MPEG-2 video (encoding format) natively so the server has to transcode (convert on the fly).
Thanks - so what do I do to make these recording streams record correctly? Like I said at the beginning - if I just play the .TS file on the server that recorded the file, the recording is stuttering and pixelated. So it’s a recording issue - not a play back issue. I watch shows I’ve downloaded just fine on the AppleTV all day long. It’s just for shows I’m trying to record using the Plex DVR.
So I would not use the transcoder on the HDHR Prime settings under live tv nor the " Use hardware acceleration when available" under Settings>Transcoder. The iGPU in your core i7 does a very poor job. If it has an AMD or Nvidia gpu I didn’t see signs of it. I had no idea that Apple dropped mpeg2 codecs from their products so that means everything has to be transcoded for playback.
About the only warning messages have to do with slow disk, which could add to your playback problems. How is your storage setup?
He was trying to play it locally on the Mac, no mpeg2 there either. Yes I agree the apple tv never had it, lack of exposure I thought Apple did everything.
