Hi all,
I’m new to the forums but not so new to Plex. We use extensively for viewing photos / videos / movies in the lounge but have used infrequently also as Freeview DVR (instead we mostly watch online streaming services). My server is a windows PC with Hauppauge USB dual tuner device, gigabit networked to my NVidia shield in a different room. I get a lot of complaints from the customer (wife) that the F1 doesn’t record or if it does we can’t reliable watch until it’s finished recording and more often than not it records in SD not HD despite having both channels working well. Now we’re into “love island season” she’s reliant on watching live or slightly delayed ITV2 (given the android tv ITV Hub app on the shield doesn’t support live streaming) and invariable the stream/recording fails to start the stream or fails part way through. She’s loosing faith and I’m loosing brownie points but not really sure where to start troubleshooting. I had verbose logging turned on so have now disabled and will share after a few more marriage denting failures so there is something to capture. Any early advise welcome
Phil
Server Version#: 1.23.3.4707
Player Version#: Latest NVidia Shield
Tuner Make/Model: WinTV-dualHD (USB, Freeview Aerial)
Guide/Lineup name: Freeview guide data
Using XMLTV?: No
Channel number/Name: ITV2 / Channel 4 / Channel 4HD (but more broadly)
The Android client sees a lot of development so live TV reliability comes and goes.
If you are a heavy Time Shift user then Plex probably isn’t your solution. The normal CPU Passmark of 2000 per stream applies and it should have a Single Thread Rating around 1500.
SD vs HD, when you schedule a recording go into advance and lock the recording to a specific station or time. Plex will default to the first available with the lowest channel number as part of it’s conflict resolution.
USB devices tend to cause Plex issues as well with driver/permission problems. HDHomeruns are recommended if available in your area.
definitely opt for an HD Homerun Quadro for Freeview. When setting a recording for F1 on C4 make sure that you specify 104 C4HD as you channel to record from, that way it will use the HD version rather than ocasionally opting for 4 C4 and SD content. USB tuners are not very reliable as the throughput required often isnt there.
Thanks I’ll take a look at the homerun if possible in UK.
I did CPU passmark checks and my i5 4690s seems a bit underpowered scoring close to the figures @pl_5309 shared - given the machine is doing other things, this is likely a bottleneck
For the SD/HD issue I’ll play with the settings but I think I’ve found the source in that I re-added the DVR and the existing schedules didn’t pick up the changes as the channels numbers presented in the drop down if I limit per channel don’t match at all the channel numbers I have configured as active channels - I’ve recreated the recording and will test that shortly
Thankyou!
Phil
Based on your recommendations I got a Silicondust HDHomeRun Connect Quatro
Based on my server performance being a bit marginal, and this video suggesting good performance using the nvidia shield as a server, I also plugged in an old 500GB USB 3.0 storage device to my shield and set it up to record rather than the Windows 10 server PC.
After recreating all recording schedules and running for a few days now I’d say recording stability is pretty good. Much better. I still get some playback issues when it’s still recording the programme I want to watch from the start (an issue reported elsewhere on this forum of the first few seconds of the recording just looping) - that issue seems well known with no committed plans to resolve (though I’m still investigating to see if anyone resolved somehow).
So a good step forward I’d say. Thanks again for the advice
Plex will probably have to do a redesign to get watch while recording to work reliably. The current method crashes from lack of resources pretty reliably.
If all you are doing is DVR and moved away from Windows you could turn that old i5 into very stable box.
