As to DRM - it’s crap, and only REALLY required by channels like HBO and Cinemax - the ultra premium stations… And used punatively by cable providers.
If DRM was required by most-the HDHomerun Prime wouldn’t be such a good product, I get Everything from my comcast locale, except ultra premium through my Prime, and available to my Plex Dvr…
And the DRM is anything from “no problem man…”, to “ONLY RECORD ONCE!” protocols… These are part of the rules placed into being, back when the FCC required cable companies to offer cable cards…
As to putting the HDHomerun Premium Channels into Your Plex DVR, sorry, I have to try to drag you to my request, as it would give a solution, this is a call for multiple epg’s! maybe with a quick check box option to add the HDHomerun Premium TV Service since it is a set group for a country, not varying… So, I really think, that this should play into the Plex Forum - Feature Request - Multiple Epg Sources
Sorry, but, this started as adding the channels, adding the epg, and, multiple epg is kinda part of that…
Same problem, but I’m in mountain time. All the weird channels like SyFy or FX that Silicondust is forcing the Pacific streams is showing content two hours behind my guide data in Plex, which matches the guide data on the actual networks websites.
Any update on this? I am in mountain time as well and trying to figure out how to make things work. Not really excited for the content and guide not matching.
As a kludge workaround, I subscribed to SD’s DVR service that costs $35 for a year subscription and fumble through that mess of an interface to record those channels that don’t match my EPG.
11 of SD’s premium channels don’t match for me:
USA
SYFY
DSC
TLC
BRAVO
APL
NGC
FOOD
TRAV
HGTV
CTOON
It’s interesting to note that the issue is not exclusive to the forced Pacific zone channels. Some of those actually work correctly for me.
Another drawback of using SD’s DVR (besides the absolutely awful interface and recording engine/options) is the allocation of multiple physical tuners - I have 2 SD Quatro’s. Plex doesn’t recognize when the SD DVR is using a tuner, so I sometimes get random failures. Plex will call a tuner and if the SD DVR is already using it, it goes to the next tuner. If Plex needs to go to the second physical tuner (> 4 streams concurrently), the recording will fail because Plex is trying to access a tuner in use and not go to the second physical tuner. Not really sure I can blame Plex on this, how many people run two different DVR services on the same box? BTW, Plex does handle the spanning of 2 physical tuners when only Plex is accessing them.
I’ll be canceling the premium sub once my shows on AMC have aired, it just doesn’t make sense to keep it when 1/3 of the channels don’t work and I have OTA, Hulu, and Netflix.
Thank you for the update! Very frustrating. I am using the HDHomerun extend so I only have 2 tuners. I was considering getting another one to go to 4 tuners but not if the guide doesn’t match what is actually playing. So say I change my guide to a pacific zip code like suggested above 90210. This wouldn’t fix it because it would then pull in the local OTA guide for the pacific time zone and those channels would be off. Right?
The other option is to use XLMTV format where you can have several zip codes, or put your vote in to have multiple EPGs, so that you can have several zip codes at once.
FYI, the XMLTV route adds other issues to the mix. It’s payware, I think it’s an annual subscription. Then you have to do all the configuration and update Plex accordingly. Finally, the biggest issue is that it adds some TV shows as movies in Plex, and last I read, that issue persists.
You can’t use a Pacific time zone zip code because the streams won’t match the content.
Plex allowing multiple EPGs would be a big help. You could add your OTA EPG, then add the cable guide. There’s a feature request for it, you can add a +1.
Thank you. I added my vote to the multiple EPG’s. Thank you for the heads up. I looked at the HDHomeRun premium TV timezone lineup and it makes sense as some are coming from the national lineup, some from the pacific timezone and some from the eastern timezone. It appears that using a pacific timezone would at least minimize the channels that don’t match up. Adding TV shows as movies presents an interesting issue. I am going to explore adding another extend to the DVR and setting up 1 OTA and the other as cable. I think that may help as the OTA can be based on my zip code and the cable channels can be based on the pacific time zone so there would just be a few channels left that wouldn’t match up. Not sure if that will work as I still need to buy the 2nd extend. This of course would likely limit 2 tuners to OTA and 2 tuners to cable which wouldn’t be ideal. Also with the XMLTV you would have to add multiple guides and merge them to get it totally right, pay the subscription fee and generate the listings every 2 weeks.
I bit the bullet and choose cable and my local zip code and then manually mapped the channels to comcast channels from the cable guide for my area’s ota. I took awhile and I am missing some ota channels that comcast doesn’t support, but I don’t really watch those channels. All in all I have about 70 channels between premium and ota. I do wish Plex would find a solution.
This is basically exactly what I did. It works fine, but as you said, there are some gaps between the available OTA subchannels, and the ones offered by Comcast. As long as that’s ok, you’re pretty solid.
I have been using TV Guide or Zap2It at no cost. There are pay XLMTV services, and not as ideal as the built in Grade Notes, but having multiple tuners in different zip code areas, it works better than nothing.
Count me as another requester for multiple EPGs. I have an OTA antenna and now HD HomeRun Premiere. I used a cable company as the EPG and that mostly works fine, but I had to leave off all of the sub-channels like Laff, Antenna-TV, This-TV, etc., which I still would like to record sometimes.
