I’ve had this happen a few times recently: If I’m trying to watch a sporting event, like a hockey or basketball game, and it’s being shown on two different channels, Plex Live TV cannot handle that situation.
On Android TV, it seems to play the broadcast from the first channel in the lineup, regardless of which channel you choose. If you click the program on the other channel, it still starts playing the first channel.
On Roku, the first channel in the lineup will play fine. But the second one will fail with an error message that Plex is unable to play it.
Plex is based in the Bay Area, yes? For any local employees, you could test this with any of the Warriors (or even Sharks?) games that are simulcast on both Comcast Sports and a national network like TNT/ESPN/etc.
To be clear: They’re the exact same listing in the guide (“NBA Basketball” or “NHL Hockey”), but they’re very different broadcasts with different announcers. So the different channels do matter, and both should be able to be tuned. (Though it should also be working properly just as a matter of good practices)
I’ve run into this problem again tonight, but with a nasty twist: the channel that is first in the guide has blacked out the sporting event. Which means I literally cannot watch a live sports event in Plex because it’s failing to tune properly.
@elan I actively avoid pinging you by name, but this problem is absolutely terrible and a dealbreaker. I can reproduce this repeatedly when watching simulcast sports. Surely someone at Plex can reproduce this too?
Nothing to add other than I’m experiencing the same thing on AndroidTV. It defaults to ESPN which is not actually playing the game since there is a local broadcast. I have no way of watching the actual game. Even going to the full guide and choosing the specific local channel sends it back to ESPN.
This is a far more frustrating problem than has been mentioned. I live in an area where the guide says I can get certain TV shows from a station that I can’t actually receive. If I do a search for the show, the search always returns the first instance it finds, which is the station that I can’t receive. When setting up the DVR, I “unchecked” this station, but it still appears in the guide and gets selected. The only way I have found to avoid this is to find another guide elsewhere on the Internet, find the right channel and time for the show, navigate to that channel/time in the DVR, and select “record.” That usually, but not always, works. Bluntly, having the guide not track with the available channels is illogical and painful. I’m happy to pay for the Plex Pass service, but I also need it to work properly. Hello, Plex, anyone home?
Right there with you. I’m not sure how to get the attention of the devs other than just naming all of them until they reply or block me (I’d rather they not block me of course; I don’t want them to feel I’m antagonistic, even while frustrated).
This is the kind of bug that would be a showstopper in a set-top box. My wife is asking why “Plex is still broken”. The NHL and NBA playoffs are coming soon, and I won’t be able to watch some of the games in Plex due to blackout issues on simulcast channels.
I’m sure the developers have way too much on their plate and likely assume that the problem is with the guide, which it isn’t. I just performed an experiment. In the DVR I “unchecked” a bunch of channels that are actually in a different market than I am in (Colorado Springs vs. Denver). From a directional perspective, they’re 110 degrees off of the direction my antenna points, which results in a really lousy signal. Now those channels no longer appear in the guide. But…having done that, I selected to record a couple of programs available on the network channels that serve the Denver market. When I open up the record items, they don’t point to the Denver channels, they point to the Colorado Springs channels, the ones that are no longer visible in my version of the guide. (Note: the relevant Colorado Springs channels have a lower number than the Denver channels.) Apparently, no matter what guide entry I actually choose, it’s the name of the show that controls, and the DVR selects the first instance of that show in the guide, even when that channel has been de-selected. This is clearly an error in the Plex programming and not the guide. Worse, there is no way to override this behavior. Fortunately, we also have an Amazon Recast, which works correctly, and which I had planned to give to a relative. We will keep it until the Plex team gets around to fixing this or I switch to a different DVR to feed the Plex server. I’m glad I didn’t purchase a lifetime subscription for Plex.
