Is it always a massive cluster of trying to be able to FF and REW while currently recording?
I tried tonight and it was like the Plex was haunted. I would try to jump forward 10 seconds and it would jump back a random X minutes.
FF was a fools gambit, it wouldn’t work at all.
I tried playing the recording from live and from the start multiple times and restarted the app.
Basically the app was completely unusable for anything other than live playback (just press Play, don’t try at all to FF or jump thru commercials), during a recording.
Happening again tonight trying to watch football. I tried to rewind a few minutes and it wasn’t at all accurate.
Then I tried to scrub back to live and it jumped back some random amount. I try to scrub multiple times and it just kept jumping backwards in time.
I tried to use the 30sec skip in the app and it went back to the start of the program - over two hours ago.
I can stop and restart the app and select to play again and it’ll give me the option to play from live again but that’s it, I have no trick play controls… at least reliable ones.
Is this normal behavior during playback of a currently recording show?
I watch a lot of live TV, especially during football season like yourself. I have also exhibited the same symptoms when watching it.
Sometimes when I select ‘play from beginning’, it will skip to Live. and like you said no amount of RW will take it back to the beginning. It can skip forward as well. Like you said, it’s random.
Also, if I quit watching a recording show, and go back to it once it’s a TV show, it will be marked as played (even tho I still have the 2nd half of the game to watch).
My main fixes are to just wait, and I’ll check the duration bar and look for the light grey area in the timeline to indicate that video has been cached. I usually have better luck “Seeking” to these areas.
It feels like it’s been a while since the Live TV experience got worked on. Good luck.
I was trying to watch the Superbowl today and have it scheduled for recording. I decided I had time to watch it about 30 minutes after it started and started watching from the beginning. Like the others mentioned, seeking is very unresponsive and basically unusable. Worse, I tried to skip a commercial about 30 minutes in and it crashed the Plex Server. At that point the PVR stopped recording and I have to manually restart things. Not happy that I’m now not going to be able to see the entire game until someone posts the entire recording online…
I’ve seen this happen now EVERY TIME, I’ve tried to watch content while it is also recording it. Clearly, this is no TiVo but it shouldn’t crash and stop recording just from trying to play it back at the same time. I’m actually a little confused why the PVR recording function doesn’t run in its own server process separate from the server used for playback. What was the design decision for that?
Same here. Watching the Super Bowl while recording was impossible. Any type of seeking would jump me back to the beginning. I could watch Live but that’s it. That was on Apple TV.
On my iPad, trying to jump around or skip 10 sec would just spin and never work.
I tried to cancel the recording halfway thru to see if I could watch the partial recording but nope - that recording wouldn’t play at all and would crash.
I don’t have this issue with smaller 30-minute programs, only longer things like SNL and sports. I feel the server just chokes on recording and simultaneous playback, which sucks.
I’m migrating from using TiVo for 20+ years and this is the biggest downside so far.
I guess I have to learn if I want to watch something partially live, just don’t record.
Today I had it happen during live but NOT recording and also watching while recording a show that was the last in a series of back to back recordings.
I was watching TV live while NOT recording, for around 90 minutes. I attempted to jump back a minute or two at around the 90 minute mark and it just refused. I could do nothing but watch live (and maybe pause).
This one was weirder. I had recordings at 8:30pm, 9pm and 10pm on the same channel. At around 10:05 I attempted to start to watch that show, while it was recording. I selected it from the Guide and it asked me if I wanted to start live or at the beginning. I said the beginning. And it started to playback at around 9:55pm, the end of the previous show. I could not FF. The timeline bar incorrectly said it was at 10pm.
I tried to play the completed 9pm recording and it played fine. Same with the 8:30 recording. Only the in-progress 10pm was acting funny.
I then tried to select the STATION from the Guide and told it to watch live. It jumped to some point in the middle of the 9pm recording. I tried to FF or New and it jumped to the middle of the 8:30 program!
My theory is that problems get worse as recordings get longer… an hour or more. And tonight I learned that back to back recordings on the same channel confuse the system into thinking it’s one long show.
Very odd, and basically means watching while recording “long” shows or shows on channels which have been tuned to for awhile will be an issue.
I hope this issue gets some dev attention - the same and/or similar issues have been reported for a long time unfortunately with no resolution…
I believe anyone who tries to time shift on any client experiences this (along with random client crashes and/or client device reboots!) when trying to seek (skip commercials) through an in progress recording. Time shift DVR functionality in Plex has been broken for a long time with no willingness to get it fixed by the Plex team. All the previous posts have auto closed out without resolution.
My annoying and lame work arounds have been to either wait for the recording to finish (seek is fine once the recording is done) or remember my time stamp, seek to live, seek back to beginning, seek to time stamp, cross your fingers that your client hasn’t crashed, and then seek again from where your remembered time stamp is…
Again, I can’t believe not a single Plex team member has been so annoyed with this that they throw their remotes at their TVs in frustation… but I guess Plex doesn’t care or doesn’t test or doesn’t use this functionality unfortunately even though it’s a super reproducible problem. Good luck, I hope it gets fixed!!
After searching the forums it appears like this issue with being able to rewind or fast forward while the dvr is recording has been an active bug/issue since the feature was introduced; is there any indications from the Dev/QA teams if this will be resolved ever or has the DVR feature effectively been abandoned?
I think not having a public way to submit and track issues is definitely a problem. Seems like that is a different topic than the recording issue. I started a thread to specifically address the lack of public issue tracking called Do the Plex Devs have a public bug tracker? I haven’t been able to find it, if they do… I encourage anyone that thinks this is a good idea to go participate in that topic discussion.
If anyone knows someone in the media, it might be helpful to bring attention to the general turning away from users and radio silence that Plex has picked up in the last few years… I’m thinking about things like Plex Experience removing beloved features like “watch together”. They could even do a survey to find out how many people have left Plex for Jellyfin and other projects due to the shift in focus away from users as well.
Let’s not all forget that one of the most valuable things Plex now has is our library and watch data. They may think they don’t need us, but their goals of creating a single place that aggregates data about all the other streaming platforms and user habits absolutely needs us. They need us, not the other way around. There are other options for us and many people are finding that out.
I have the same issues as described. I even installed Plex on a Mac Mini M4 and have it running on a Synology NAS. Both devices have these same issues. I can only hope this is resolved with the new version coming out which has beta testing going on currently.
Having the same issue as well. Timeline to fast forward (ie: through commercials) show an inaccurate timeline. While you can fast forward lets say to 30min, it brings you to the 30 minute mark (i guess) but the timeline reverts back to zero and from now on the timeline is reset so it doesnt know where you are in the actual timeline of the show. Also, if that show happens to ‘end’ during the timeline skip, it loses the show and you have to go into the recording section to start watching again. Not sure if its actually a client related thing as I am watching on a Samsung TV. Have to check other ‘clients’ to see if it happens.
Now I’ve got an issue where I can watch live without issue but recorded programs have no audio. I tried playing the video files on a PC with VLC and there is no audio. Checked file properties and sure enough, no audio tracks. This has happened since the last server update.
Getting really tired of the lack of integration testing for Plex. New updates shouldn’t break existing features. It’s like they don’t care about the PVR function and have testing of it at all.
I have been having the exact same issue for over a year. Makes time shifting while watching a program that is recording useless. Can’t pick a program from the guide without it going back to the beginning of the previous recording. Seems to be especially bad when recording back to back programs on the same channel. Also, new changes made to the ios app have made it virtually useless for watching anything live. Guide is not populating.
Why would you put out an app that breaks so many features that wer mostly working???
