I’m new to this so bear with me. My setup is a 16g Shield TV with a 256g USB drive attached and formatted. OTA signal (from Mobile Sky 60) comes into the Shield with a supported USB tuner. I receive about 45 channels, mostly with no problem. I do get a “weak signal” warning a few times an hour (I’m working on getting a better signal).
Every scheduled program I’ve tried always stops recording between 5 and 13 minutes after the start. Is this related to the weak signal? Does the DVR stop when the signal is temporarily interrupted?
This DVR is the last piece in my cord-cutting puzzle. It HAS to work for my better half to sign onto dumping Comcast.
I am using a SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime and Plex recordings would stop after 6 min and 6 seconds (6:06) with a fair amount of consistency. In this case I solved it easily enough with a firmware update for the SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime.
I had recently bought another SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime and didn’t notice that the recording problem started after switching Plex DVR to the new one. Apparently the new SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime unit was using an older and problematic firmware.
Naturally this might not be your problem though and I can’t say if your tuner even has firmware updates.
Are you sure your tuner is on the supported list of tuners? If not you might want to consider getting a supported tuner.
Thanks for the feedback. The USB tuner is listed as supported on the Plex website. Scrolling down, I found this note: “For over-the-air broadcasts, a weak television signal can interfere with both DVR and live TV viewing.”
So it seems I need to double down on fixing my reception issue. According to the FCC website, all major broadcast networks are showing good signal for my address and zip code, so something is up!
Sometimes you can boost the signal with an amplifier.
I have something of a Frankenstein antenna configuration. To avoid having to make directional adjustments for different channels I settled on using three different antennas (in different directions) spliced together with coax cable splitters and an amplifier.
Usually it works fairly well. Typically the only exception is when there are atmospheric issues such as a rain storm. There is no way around that though.
Edit:
For what it’s worth, my over the air tuners are the old style SiliconDust HDHomeRun Dual (white) network tuners. I have 4x of them. I don’t use the OTA tuners in Plex DVR but they have been fairly sold performers for years.
IMO Plex would benefit from a signal strength indicator. I seem to recall that Microsoft Media Center had setup tools with signal strength specificity and it looks like Plex is lacking this.
Also, signal strength issues didn’t necessarily destroy or render recorded TV unusable in Microsoft Media Center. Instead, at worst, you would see a poor signal strength error (which you could scrub / skip past) or at best you would see a blocky, stuttering image until the signal improved.
For many reasons, I decided to reset the Shield TV to factory and now Plex can’t even find the USB tuner. Great…
In the meantime, I climbed on the roof and repositioned the antenna about 30 degrees to the east (after studying the FCC maps). Hooking the cable directly into the TV and scanning for channels produced all the ones I should be getting. The TV even has a signal meter function and I could see all of my stations were coming in between 62 and 93% and the picture was perfect. This was without using Mohu’s amplifier.
I was thinking of switching to a Hdhomerun Connect. Is it still necessary to use Ethernet to connect to the LOAN or is WiFi good enough?
I’ve never tried WiFi so I can’t say. My initial thought was if you have something like 802.11ac or faster end to end then it should be fine but again I can’t say for sure.
In some cases the HDHomeRun can be connected directly to a device via Ethernet rather then over the network. The problem there is that you need a way to assign an IP address to the HDHomeRun. On a PC or a server with multiple NICs it’s not difficult to assign an iP Address to a directly connected HDHomeRun but not some much other devices like the Shield.
I have a the same issue… 9/10 of my scheduled recordings are only saving 2 mins worth of video… .I’m using the recommended hauppauge quad tuner with a Win7 box
same results! this service is useless to me. Best I can tell is if the signal quality drops even for a second during a recording, the video capture stops… plex shows all the content was recorded in full length and if I open the file in VLC all the audio continues past the point of video stoppage but video image is frozen. Plex apps all stop playback and returns to home screen at the same point as if the video was over even though it shows 30+ mins left in the recordings. Looks like there is not as much tolerance in the video recording as there is in the audio.
I gave up on the DVR. Check out Sonarr. Sonarr tracks and downloads all your favorite shows automatically. Then you can just watch them thru plex. You can add Radarr to it for movies.
