I’m recording NFL games and other sporting events via an OTA HD Homerun and watching them delayed. I record them with a 60 minute buffer at the end, because the games can run late or go to overtime. If I stop them to watch later or want to shift to different devices, there are a couple of glaring problems that I can’t believe haven’t been addressed.
If I try to start the recording after the airing has finished according to the guide, if it’s still recording you literally can’t find the recording to start it. This happened watching the NFL championship games today - twice! This is such a crappy experience and embarrassing when you have friends over to watch the game. Not a good advertisement for Plex!
Every time you start the active recording (assuming you can find it), you have to start from the beginning. Even when the recording has finished, you have to start from the beginning again if you start it again.
While I would love to have active recordings show up in the TV Shows section while they are recording, I appreciate this might be hard to do easily. Therefore perhaps Plex can keep the guide pinned to when the active recordings started so you can at least find them to start.
And then add some metadata that can be referenced when you start to watch an active recording (or recently finished recording) if you want to resume the active recording you’ve been watching so you can easily continue where you left off.
Regarding (1), this has been a limitation (i.e. extreme flaw) for over 5 years now. Basically, Plex is the worst DVR among its piers if you like to watch live sports and timeshift.
If you have a tuner that works with something like NextPVR or Jellyfin (both free), you could use one of those programs as your TV recorder and record into a Plex library. The in-progress recording would show up as a normal item in Plex. So you could still use Plex as your player if that’s your preference.
It is unfortunate though that the best way to way to watch a live sports event in Plex is to use someone else’s DVR. I personally stopped using Plex years ago. NextPVR has a far more powerful/flexible scheduler for recording and I use Jellyfin as my library manager and player. I just finally got tired of all the idiotic limitations in the Plex DVR and the constant parade of bugs in the various client players that would break playback.
Tx. I’ve tried using tvheadend and HD homerun NVR to do this, but have had limited success in getting Plex to recognize the recordings that are being written to the folders that Plex is monitoring, even after the recording finishes. I think it is something to do with naming conventions, but I couldn’t figure out how to address that. Does nextpvr or jellyfin solve this issue? (Note I need the Pvr app for Synology)
It’s been more than 3 years since I used Plex/NextPVR as I described. But I believe I had NextPVR record to an “Other Videos” Plex Library folder. The videos would just show up in Plex by their file name which avoided the whole issue of file name recognition which would occur for a Plex TV Shows library.
I can’t remember if I had to force a library rescan to get the in-progress file to show up.
I do recall that this was a very effective/reliable way to timeshift live tv programs (at least until the Android/AdroidTV clients started having regular/severe playback bugs with all videos).
