I know Plex’s FAQ currently says “Tuners should be of the same type; all OTA or all cable”, but having just set it up myself and seen how seamlessly HDHR’s Connect (OTA) and Prime (Cable) tuners worked together, I’m hoping Plex can make it happen without too much work.
Reason for feature request: The picture quality OTA (crisp 1080i) is so much better than the signal over cable (fuzzy 720p), so I’d like to be able to draw from OTA channel signal and just use cable card tuner to supplement channels unavailable OTA.
My experience combining HDHR Connect and HDHR Prime Tuners: FWIW, I don’t subscribe to cable tv packages, but my ISP includes the free local channels with any internet subscription if you pay $2/month for a cable card. Unfortunately while I get most of my locals with my antenna, I’m missing FOX and PBS. So my goal was to have NBC, ABC, CBS, etc. piped through my OTA tuner, with FOX and PBS coming through my cable card tuner.
Plex was already setup with my Connect (OTA) tuner, so I started by adding my Prime-cable tuner to my router. Once it was plugged in, I logged in directly to the Prime tuner (by typing the tuner’s LAN IP into my browswer) and de-selected the channels I was already getting OTA, so there wouldn’t be confusing duplication. Then I loaded the HDHR viewer app on my Nvidia Shield (Pro, 1st gen), and presto, it was all there, channels from both tuners seamlessly integrated in the one Live TV app. It not only recognized both channels from both devices, it also seemed to have no problem pulling all the EPG data from both OTA source and Cable source. Success!
I then logged into my PMS (runs on the Shield) to add the HDHR Prime tuner. At this point, I thought that despite Plex’s FAQ warning, that it would still work. This was because the PMS settings seemed willing to take the EPG data from my missing OTA channels (FOX & PBS, and their respective sub-channels) and assign it to corresponding channels coming from the Prime.
For example, FOX’s local OTA channel (the one I couldn’t receive via my antenna) was 5.1, but the same channel was being delivered as Channel 604 over cable. I was really encouraged here, because it seemed as though Plex was going to let me assign the 5.1 OTA EPG data to the Channel 604 signal coming from the Prime tuner. Brilliant! Sure, an extra step than the seamless combination in the HDHR viewer, but nonetheless an elegant one-time task to combine tuners. See here for a screenshot:
Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work. If I attempt to tune to one of the channels coming over the Prime, I get “An error has occurred” message.
Recommendation: Perhaps as an easy fix, Plex could copy Google’s Live Channels approach, and offer the user the option of drawing channels from the HDHR App as opposed to directly from the network tuners?
