Is Plex + TVHeadend possible?

Live TV & DVR
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1

Hello,
Is it possible to use TVHeadend with Plex?
Greetings

2

Or using a Sundtek DVB-S2 tuner with Plex on a Synology NAS.

3

Synology, as of DSM 7, does not support USB tuner devices anymore.
They only support USB storage devices.

If the tuner is a network tuner, and you have software packages (tvheadend), you can probably make it work. (no guarantees because it’s not our product).

4

I’ve been using tvHeadend w/ Plex Media Server for 3+ years now. The “glue” you need is tvhProxy to get them to talk to each other. I run a collapsed configuration, all services running on a single Linux host.

tvHeadend can be complicated to get running.

5

You can use tvheadend + xTeVe. This is what I do and it works just fine.

If you need more info like the correct URL syntax to import the channels from tvheadend to xTeVe let me know.

tvhProxy as far as I know is limited to one stream. xTeVe is virtually unlimited based on your tuners.

I also have a modified tvheadend that will select a stream at random for a specific channel if you have more than one source for the channel.

6

Hi. I’m trying to setup tvheadend and plex, testing tvhProxy to see how good it is, I’m using this fork: GitHub - chkuendig/tvhProxy: 📡 Connect Plex DVR with tvheadend (incl. EPG) which seems to have some recent updates. I’m interested in how you setup xTeVe, didn’t find any specific details of tvheadend in their docs but thought a bit and kinda figured the M3U part, but epg is still not figured out to me.

While I was trying tvhProxy, I found the plex LiveTV GUI to be very frustrating and not helpful or lacking. I just wish to list some points here in hopes that xTeVe maybe solves, here’s a pic for reference:

image
image950Ă—526 46 KB

  • While setting up the LiveTV, I selected my EPG language to be english. For some reason it shows me the titles and description of the shows in language other than English. I inspected the epg.xml file and found that epg programme actually contained the title and description in English in addition to the other language.
  • In the picture, the channel can be very difficult to be figured out. Like the name of the channel is truncated or even completely missing. I noticed that the missing ones are somewhat related to the channel having an image icon, maybe it’s just not being displayed properly (inspected the html of the page and found literally nothing in the div).
  • I can’t even search for the channel name in the search bar, which is something I feel really needed. Like I just want to open a channel, I’d think that searching it would be straightforward, but it doesn’t seem to have that. Also there’s no section that lists the channels, on sections that list the shows from the EPG.
  • I kinda wished that Plex stream quality settings be more consistent and similar. Like there’s an option to set the quality to convert automatically for Movies and TV Shows, but not for Live TV. With Live TV streams you can only choose a certain fixed resolution or the original quality.
  • Also not happy with the channel number showing in front of the channel name in the second column, though I think that this is tvhProxy adding this.
  • Lastly, though it’s not a big deal, what’s the point of having EPG for channels if the channel initially does not have any EPG guide, I mean most of the channels just have a show with title being the channel name and the description being “No programming information”.

Would be happy to get more tips on how to improve this setup. Thanks!

EDIT: forgot to mention the versions just in case:
Plex Web: Version 4.76.1
Plex Server: Version 1.26.2.5797

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So far I’ve realized that tvhProxy is just supplying plex with URLs that point to tvheadend for streaming. Also it has a configuration that will tell how many streams (or tuners) there are, this shows up in plex with colored green or red dots near the tuner.

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This is incorrect. I have a tvHeadend+tvhProxy setup running with up to 5 streams (and I see no need for xTeve in this situation.)

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Yes, but you need to put in some work.

Plex is unable to directly connect to tvheadend, but you can use Antennas GitHub - jfarseneau/antennas: 📡 DVR emulator for Plex DVR to connect to Tvheadend. to act as a bridge between the two. It basically exposes your tvheadend as an hdhomerun device that Plex does support.

I am running such a setup here because I watch dvb-s2 channels which require a CAM/CI + smartcard that Plex sadly does not support at all.

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