I am considering a HDHomerun to use in combination with PlexPass. While my household wifi is pretty good, the current computer I have as my plex server is pretty old. It works for me for streaming my content around the house. I was wondering if it would be of value to get a HDHomerun Extend. Would this take some of the processing off of my Plex server, or is it only valuable if my in-house internet is slow or I need smaller files?
It’s not going to change how your existing content files will stream. It will transcode the digital TV stream to a compatible format from antenna which will be used for livetv or a DVR recording
I have a 10yr old server paired with an Extend. It enables me to use live streaming and the fact that it has already pretranscoded content for DVR means that commercial removal doesn’t kill my system. The Extend works well. If it is in your budget, go for it.
@BigWheel is of course spot on. I’ll elaborate since I have an Extend and used it with a old underpowered Plex server for about a year. Do you have or want to watch OTA Live TV or record OTA Live TV? If yes read on. If not then the Extend does nothing for you, and please ignore the rest of this post as a ramble you really don’t care about.
In the USA most OTA stations still broadcast with MPEG2 encoding in a .ts container. When I set my Extend to not transcode and use MPEG2/.ts (essentially making the Extend the same as an HDHR OTA tuner that doesn’t transcode) then my old Plex server struggled with Live TV or playing back TV recordings. Forget doing commercial removal - it would take longer to complete than the length of the recording.
I found that if I set my Extend transcode settings in Plex on “High Quality (30 fps limit)” then it was a significant improvement. This caused the Extend to output at most a 720p resolution stream (reducing if originally in 1080p or i), and also transcoded from MPEG2 to h.264. I still needed to make sure my Plex clients were all direct play or direct stream, but for me it was enought of a difference to make OTA TV through Plex viable with that old computer. I will say that at the time the Plex Roku client, one of my primary clients, was having some problems with MPEG2/.ts. I think it is better now, though don’t take my word for it (more later.) Also, I didn’t have a lot of disk space and it reduced each recording to less than 50% of the original.
There is also an Extend transcode setting that will make it keep the original quality, but change the encoding from MPEG2 to h.264. This will still save some space on disk since h.264 has better compression than MPEG2. If you regularly watch sports then this Extend setting is for you. The 720p transcode setting, particularly if you have stations than broadcast in 1080, just doesn’t look crisp for sports. Fast motion gets a bit blurry.
About six months ago I upgraded to a new modern server that runs Plex and has a good GPU. I still let my Extend do the TV transcoding from MPEG2 to H.264. In general things in the Plexverse just seem to work… smoother?.. with H.264 vs MPEG2. I wish the Extend would also remux from .ts to .mp4 since the Plexverse seems most happy across everything with h.264/.mp4, but I’m still happy with my Extend!
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I’ll chime in that I’m also using an Extend with an older Plex server (an early 2008 iMac). I went with the Extend in particular as a way to reduce network strain but also to help with storage space. I’m someone who records a show, watches it at some point and then deletes it. I don’t save any of my DVR’d stuff and I’m not concerned with having the highest quality possible. Like hokierulz, I also use the High Quality setting and even on my big TV, I find the DVR’d shows to be totally watchable even at this lower setting.
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