So I am sure a bunch of you set the SuperBowl to record with hopes to watch maybe an hour in so you can skip commercials and catch up to live closer to 4th quarter (well maybe not skip all the commercials). Here is how mine went:
I scheduled the recording this morning (for a 3:00pm kick off pacific time). I set it to record 90 minutes past the scheduled ending so I don’t miss potential OT, or the ceremony.
Right around 4pm, I used the Plex client on the Shield to find the Superbowl under “Watch Now” and clicked it.
PROBLEM #1: Plex client says "Do you want to watch from the beginning or Live (this recording started 347 minutes ago). 347 MINUTES AGO? Anyway I click on “from the beginning”
PROBLEM #2: Show starts from the beginning BUT WITH NO AVAILABLE BUFFER to fast forward. Now I am stuck watching some pre-show that spilled over which I don’t care for, plus I can’t FF the commercials I don’t want to watch. I exited out, tried a couple more times, nada.
So I finally click on ‘watch live’ and I miss most of the first quarter.
I watch the whole thing live (don’t dare to pause, let it buffer etc). Good news is that the live feed goes without a hitch! Great job Plex!
Right after the final whistle, I stop it (recording still going as per the 90 min setting) and go to put my kids down.
I come back 45 mins later, and I am thinking I will just resume from where I left so I can watch the winner get the trophy. But how do I do that?
PROBLEM #3: By now the “Watch now” section is not showing that the SB is on anymore (since it is past its scheduled ending) so there is no way for me to get to tap into the recording from where I left off (you would think clicking on the recording schedule entry would take you to the stream as I can still see SB recording there).
Fine, on my laptop now (Plex Web) I will just watch whatever show is on now on NBC and catch whatever is left of the post game show. I go to the “Watch now” section…
PROBLEM #4: There is NO WAY to tell what station each EPG entry is associated with. I literally have to randomly tune to shows to see if this is coming from NBC. This is 2018!
PROBLEM #4: There is NO WAY to tell what station each EPG entry is associated with. I literally have to randomly tune to shows to see if this is coming from NBC. This is 2018!
PROBLEM #2: Does anyone know if this is reported anywhere? That’s my biggest blocker to using the DVR functionality at the moment as quite often we want to watch something “almost live” but usually just wait for 15 minutes after it’s started so we can skip all the recordings - but this currently isn’t possible with Plex DVR.
I have tried live TV recording and watching later many times on my Sony Bravia Android TV. I always have the buffer issue. I can fast forward a bit, but once I reach the buffer (not very big) I get an error about losing connection to the server and it stops “watching”. When I try to resume I get an error and no matter what I do I cannot watch the show at all anymore in the Plex app and the web player tells me it can’t tune the channel, but there is currently only 1 recording (this show) and the other tuner is free (HD HomeRun Connect)
I had to watch the recorded file over VLC over a computer hooked up to the TV. I would LOVE if Plex would fix these bugs, they have been lingering for a while…
My server is still in verbose from another problem, so I may have pots…
ok well, good to hear that I was not the only one. For the record, watching something already recording but from the beginning usually works for me and I can see the amount of buffer I have. Skipping ahead is an issue. I have another post (https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/306599/error-when-fast-forwarding-live-tv#latest) where I am explaining the issue I have with FF and it is similar to yours @DustSt0rm
I could barely get it to work live on roku so I would not even dream of the dvr. It would play for maybe 30 minutes then just stop and try to reload and then cant. Web based says cant tune channel. If I restart plex docker then it will work for another X times. At the moment it really feels like a POS and you cannot rely on it at all. These types of problems are what people are talking about when they say why even bother with VR and podcasts until these kinds of bugs are worked out. 0 bugs should exist for the actual playback of any material as this is the main point of Plex. I can allow bugs for metadata and such.
I set my DVR to begin on the EPG start time (5pm CST for me) and then run 120 mins longer. DVR event kicked off OK and all seemed to be going well. I needed to do some other errands so I hit pause and left the room for a couple of hours.
I came back to the Shield TV screen saver being on. I cleared the screen saver and the Plex client had me back on the Show/Episode screen from the Watch Now area, so I clicked on Watch.
It gave me the option to Watch from Beginning which even shows how many ‘mins’ ago or Watch Live.
I selected ‘Watch from Beginning’ but it started mid-way through the first quarter, even though the buffer on the REW/FF bar shows I could go back further, I was not able to.
I tried this several different times over the next couple of hours and it kept starting at later points in the game - the later I tried it, the later it made me start.
After the show was finished according to the EPG, the ‘Watch Now’ section showed the next scheduled show (the one I extended 120 min into) and I can see a recording was still happening but I was unable to even get to the football game at this point.
I thought I lost the SB recording as I did not see it anywhere (in DVR lib) nor could I get to it from the program guide area.
The recorded SB did not show up in my DVR library which technically it should have since it finished according to the EPG. I know the file was still in use recording the other 120 mins, but the client software should hide those details.
After the 120mins was up, the entire thing moved over to the DVR library and all the content was there from the beginning through 6 hours of TV time. Whew!!
Seems like Plex relies solely on the EPG info trying to navigate the shows during a live recording. This fails as you can start recordings early and end them really late. I had to stop setting the ‘record XX mins early’ flag as when you do this it picks up the prior EPG show name vs the show you selected to record.
A little buggy overall using the start X min early/end X min late feature and how that interacts with the EPG during recording.
Plex team - please think through all these scenarios and come up with a logical, intuitive way to handle this. (Hint: Check out any other DVR system that has been on the market for more than a couple of years). This is DVR 101 and should be addressed.
I can’t speak to any issues watching live (since I don’t have any non-Windows devices other than my phone (as live TV still isn’t supported on PMP for Windows), and I was away on business during the game and watched at a sports bar), but I’m still having matching issues with NFL games.
It shows up in the program guide perfectly fine, but when it gets recorded, it shows up as “The Real Football Factories” in my TV Shows library. If I tell PMS to Unmatch, it then brings up the search dialog box to rematch it to something, but none of the results are correct. If I cancel out, it just shows title info (based on folder structure). I just moved it to a non-PMS folder and then back into TV Shows folder and it’s back displaying as TRFF again.
I had a convo with someone on Twitter who said his was showing perfectly fine (showed me a screenshot to prove, showed correct game info). He was using an OTA HDHR, where mine is a CC model. But I’m not sure what’s causing it, as it’s showing up perfectly fine in Plex’s program guide. Same thing happened with last year’s SB as well, I haven’t tried regular season games, but I’m assuming it would be the same. Using latest version of PMS (on Windows) and latest firmware on HDHR.
Weird it does that (I think that might have happened to me once early on but have not seen it in a while). On mine (HDHR Prime which I don’t think has anything to do with the matching), I get “NFL Football” as the show, “Season 2018” for the season name and the date of the game as the episode name. I bet you that’s is what is coming down from Gracenote.
My file structure and naming (from PMS/Gracenote) is: \TV Shows\NFL Football (2002)\Season 2018\NFL Football (2002) - 2018-02-04 00 00 00 - Philadelphia Eagles vs. New England Patriots.ts
@tachtevrenidis did you happen to get logs from you ShieldTV or the zip file from the server?
I would love to take a look at them.
After all was said and done, did you get a successful DVR recording added to your library? If so:
when you play it back now does it appear to start some 300 minutes early or does it start right around 3 pm as it should?
After a while Plex thought it had 2 sessions open to my Dual Tuner (showing in the DVR admin section of Plex). In reality Plex only had 1 session/Roku open to the Superbowl and when the second TV(Roku Ultra) tried to go to that channel, Plex tried to open a 3rd Tuner session and failed at 13% forever. Restarting Plex Server made the “problem” go away.
Long time Plex user, first time (for this duration) and my Superbowl experience with Plex was dismal.I wasn’t even trying recording … just LiveTV.
I had mix of 4 different error messages ( unable to tune, something about buffer ). That and endless spinning when I try to watch the show. Eventually switched to the HDHR App.
HDHR Prime, Sony Android TV, Gigabit LAN, Server passmark of 6161.
LiveTV is definitely not ready for beta testing, let alone prime time. WAF for LiveTV is in the negative.
I’m willing to troubleshoot if anyone cares.
And to echo the original poster’s sentiment …
Why Plex? WHY?
You can increase the number of log files to a bigger number if you like. By default the server keeps 5 but it’s quite easy to bump this number up to 10, 15 or 25 so that you can keep a few days worth of logs available which can be quite helpful with DVR issues.
Look for the setting LogNumFiles in here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/201105343-advanced-hidden-server-settings/
