It appears the the HDHomeRun Extend isn’t transcoding when doing Live TV via Plex. The Plex server is doing the transcoding and can’t keep up. I have to pause a show for several minutes to let it buffer. DVR via the Extend via Plex appears to use the transcoder in the Extend.
Am I missing an option somewhere to tell the HDHomeRun Extend to do all the transcoding for Live TV as it does for DVR?
Thanks, Jim
I don’t have an Extend but can you not set the transcode settings on the Extend and leave Plex set to Original or whatever the setting is that accepts the incoming stream with no transcoding done in Plex? If you can the Extend would then always transcode the stream before sending it out whether for DVR or Live TV.
I will give that a whirl. Thanks for the great idea, John!
Also, I found that I didn’t have the “Update Channel” set to PlexPass, so I didn’t have the latest Plex software installed on my Synology. Still in learning mode. 
Well, that didn’t work. I have the transcoder profile set to “heavy” and I’m not advertising native format on the Extend. When I’m watching a recorded TV show, CPU on the Synology, is 5-10%. When I’m watching live TV the Synology is 95-100% CPU. For some reason Plex on the Synology thinks it has to transcode the Live TV stream.
Other thoughts, anyone?
SanJuanIslandsMedia, I did as johnm_ColaSC suggested and made the following edits:
HDHomerun EXTEND: Uncheck native format, set default encoder to “heavy”
PLEX server DVR settings: Switch the transcode setting there to use the original file format
After doing that, my AppleTV now consistently plays both live TV and recorded shows without any problem over the PLEX app.
I did have to reposition the indoor antenna that’s connected to the HDHomerun EXTEND a couple of times to find the best spot in the room before I had a consistently usable signal across all my channels; even now I’m missing one primetime station and I’ll probably be switching to a roof-mounted one at some point. I do think that helped at least a little, as the HDHomeRun wasn’t struggling to pull in a signal to transcode.
It doesn’t seem to solve the problem. I can only use Plex tv through my iPhone, but when I set the hdhomerun to Heavy transcode and leave Plex on Original, the hdhomerun does no transcoding and leaves it to Plex. When I change Plex to Highest Quality, the hdhomerun shows a heavy transcode but Plex is still transcoding as well (at the same CPU percentage as Original setting).
My assumption is that the hdhomerun extend should be able to transcode the video portion at the very least. I’m not sure about the audio but that should be minimal transcoding from the Plex side.
When streaming TV using Plex with HDHomerun i am experiencing two sets of problems.
1- When watching certain channels, one of my locals, I will click on it and it will either choose not to load, or loads, plays for a seconds, then takes me back to the program guide. I have removed the HDhomerun device, updated firmware, rescanned for channels, reset plex media server and re-setup all of that configuration and the problem still persists.
2- When watching tv shows, it will at random prompt saying the “server is not strong enough for playback.” I’ve tried to see if there was a way to modify transcoder settings given that the extend is supposed to have a built in transcoder but have yet to find a reasoning for this error. I have also checked the server usage when this error appears and not of the resources are remotely being consumed. My server specs are an i7 CPU, 32GB DDR3 Ram, GTX 980, and ATT Gigabyte Internet Service.
My devices that I am streaming Plex/Live TV on are the Apple TV Gen 4.
Does anyone have any thoughts on what to try?
I think that part of the playback issues could be from going back to ts format. Some devices seem to not handle that as well as mkv containers but there were issues with closed captioning so they went back to ts. Could be wrong but I thought I saw other ios devices start to have issues with that switch in some other threads. A nas would have a hard time transcoding it to an ios compatible stream.
I brought this up when they switched to TS containers, and was basically told by “Bigwheel” that it indeed was because of closed captioning. Apparently they opted for closed captioning in a file that can’t be watched. And totally ignored that I said we should have the choice of container because, you know, we’re paying for plex pass. The whole thing is bull ■■■■.
Yeah seems like marketing and the easiest to-market solution is what they’re concerned with. I am unaware of any testing this stuff goes through before they roll out fancy webpages and big claims about how well their ■■■■ works.
Where are you setting the transcode setting? I found that you can set it on the HDHomerun site my.hdhomerun.com as well as in the Plex settings. But updating one doesn’t seem to update the other.
