As a little update, I decided to test something out. I installed PMS on my gaming rig, and I’m streaming two live signals using my HDHomerun Connect Duo to the same two devices I was having issues with (a roku wirelessly and a chrome browser, wired). So far in 30 minutes of testing no lag no buffering, etc. It was for sure the CPU on the Mac Mini as the bottleneck. I’m going to push it further today and see if I can stream to my iPhone, ipad, and another few Roku devices at the same time to see if it may be worth just leaving my gaming rig on all the time, or if I should purpose build a new one to leave in the closet.
When the Extend comes in setup the Mac Mini DVR settings with it and retry streaming from the Mac Mini Plex Server. Try the different Transcode settings in Plex for the Extend. I use Highest Quality for my Extends, the other poster mentioned he uses High Quality. There is a pretty good write up of the Extend by another Plex user: Making The HD Homerun Work My Way.
I certainly will, and I’ll give that article a read. I’ve been running from my gaming computer for a few hours and haven’t noticed any hiccups at all, so I’m really hoping that the extend by taking away any transcoding issues will help my Mac Mini.
Wow, I didn’t know one antenna could do all of that. That’s pretty incredible.
Nothing particularly special. Very old school. One antenna can support all the TVs in your house if the levels are maintained by amplifying as needed when splitting or when making long runs. But, with digital TV, over amplifying can be as big a problem as a weak signal.
In this house, I have an old school rooftop style VHF-UHF antenna mounted in the attic and pointed at Houston’s TV broadcast towers 22 miles away. When I did away with the Dish, I routed the cable company’s coax to the cable modem for Internet and used the rest of the house’s coax for TVs, tuners, DVRs and the FM section of my receivers. There are additional spitter / amps in the attic, some of which date from an earlier cable TV system. Cable and TV frequencies are much the same, so usually the same amps and splitters can be used. Satellite distribution requires amps and splitters that support higher frequencies, but sometimes the amps and splitters support both.
As a little update, I decided to test something out.
Have you checked the Dashboard during your comparison to make sure both boxes are doing the same transcoding. Depending on changes you have made from Plex defaults, they may be doing very different tasks.
I’m going to push it further today and see if I can stream to my iPhone, ipad, and another few Roku devices
Be sure to try out the MPEG2 direct streaming in the new Roku Preview Players if your Rokus are new enough to support it. Many do. It requires no transcoding by the server. Check the video settings in the player.
