I tried an experiment last night and it didn’t work. Maybe I have the wrong settings or maybe this feature isn’t implemented.
I want to record two shows back to back and have them start 1 minute late and 1 minute early on the same channed using the same tuner. That means for 2 minutes that data is being saved to two different files. Is this possible? It didn’t work when I tried it last night by recording 3 shows at one time and 3 shows after them on the same channels using my HDHomerun Prime.
Edit: My latest understanding is that this was broken on the system I was testing with because even though it’s not transcoding I think it dumps the data in the transcode folder and on that system it didn’t have enough space to store 6 complete shows at once during the overlap period. Plex code seems to look if it can fit the whole show there before it starts and then take that data and make the final file of the show.
The other thing that’s happening it seems is that Plex hasn’t implemented this feature, but HDHomeruns (and others?) make it work by just giving Plex the data for the duplicate recording using the same tuner. So one 4-tuner device is going to work better than a bunch of 1 or 2-tuner devices with their DVR service. If Plex were to just look at what tuner device already had this channel and then make sure it asked that same device to send data, this would effectively give Plex this ability if the device supported it without breaking functionality for others or rewriting a bunch of code.
I’ll have to check again - I thought my test of the same thing worked. If I understand the OP correctly, the programs are on the same channel (the linked Feature Request looks like the programs are on the different channels, 8.1 and 8.2). For the overlap on the same channel, I thought only one tuner was needed.
It not only should be possible to do this, it should only need to use one tuner. In frustration, I gave up on Plex DVR and the DVR I use now recognizes the back to back situation you described and will record two files from the same tuner for those 2 minutes. If a freebie DVR developed in someone’s spare time can do this, why can’t Plex?
From what I can tell, HDHomerun’s DVR can do this and will put the files on a NAS location that Plex can pick up. It just means I’m moving from an already paid for lifetime plex pass to a $35 per year HDHomerun service fee to fix the issue and ask the family to schedule recordings in a separate service. IDK. If there was a way to have Plex schedule the HDHomerun’s DVR from inside the app then I might consider paying $35/year.
I was also going to look into Jellyfin to see what they have.
Yea, it’s been a while, but if I had more than 3 channels to record - I’d use Channels again.
Something that works as well as Channels does - is worth paying for. <–it’s ALL they do.
HDHR service blows goats - cheaper is obviously not better.
I’ve used all 3.
It’s not difficult making the correct choice.
In fact, I bought a year of HDHR’s DVR Service - then abandoned it with 11.5 months to go in favor of Channels. Won’t make that mistake again.
Ok. We were getting off-toping (overlapping recordings) and now we’re getting more off-topic so I’m dropping it after this. I wasn’t arguing that channels wasn’t good or that hdhomerun was better or just as good. I’ve never used either. I was just asking how 230% was considered “about the same price”. Maybe they have a cheaper subscription I didn’t know about or something. I consider up to $50 about the same as $35 so I was confused.
I just ran a test using the latest Plex server version (that I have been notified of) running on Linux Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS and using a HDHomerun HDHR5-4US. Not the same tuner, but I’m not sure that matters. I think Plex makes it happen.
I recorded 3 programs on three different channels and also recorded the TV programs that follow each of the first three. I have my Plex setup to record one minute before and 5 minutes after. During the overlap period (1 minute), I have the overlap of each of the 6 programs while using only 3 tuners.
What happens when you select all six to record? Does Plex think it can record all that you selected? Does it notify you of a conflict? Or does it simple record all, but you get no overlap?
Wouldn’t there be a 6 minute overlap if one was recording 5 minutes after and one with one minute early?
Yes plex thinks it can record all of them. Sometimes it lists them as overlapping and thinks it’s going to start them at :29 or :59. Other times it’s looked like it has starting set to :00 or :30.
What I see if I have them set to allow partial is that the first ones record for 32 minutes and the second ones are less than 30. Also, if I FF to the last time of one I don’t see the same on the beginning of the other. Seems to me it waits for the first one to be done and then doesn’t immediately start but comes around to check again if it has a free tuner some time later. It’s an ok strategy if you assume there are a bunch of services or computers all trying to use the same tuner I guess
Yes, your right - There are 6 minutes of overlap. And all minutes are recorded. I just checked. Also, when I click on the Activity icon (to get to the Dashboard) and it was showing six programs recording at the same time during the overlap period.
Ok. So that’s great news… now I guess I need to figure out the secret recipe to make this work. I guess some hope is that I was planning on doing DVR on a server I’m about to build that will have more resources. I’m currently on a NUC because for the longest time it was just serving up mostly kid’s movies and I could take it in the car on a long trip
For what it’s worth, I just performed a quick test of this on one of my servers as well. I scheduled two back-to-back episodes to record, the first with one minute added to the end, the second with 1 minute prepended to the beginning.
In my test, the DVR only used a single tuner of four on the HDHomeRun Connect 4K; the resulting recordings both had the resulting overlapped content. So, even though the DVR could have chosen to use a separate tuner, it did not.
I’m running the forum preview of the new Plex Media Server builds on a Pop!_OS 20.10 Linux server.
The same TV channel can be recorded by two different DVR tuners* (eg using the HDHomerun connect Duo or Quatro) allowing 2 back to back episodes to be recorded with overlap.
…or have I misunderstood the question?
[edit: change the word “channels” to “tuners” for clarity]
