Server Version#: 4.34.4, running on Windows 10
Player Version#: Both the web player running on the server and the Samsung TV app 5.1.3
Tuner Make/Model: Hauppage WinTV-dualHD (from the approved tuners list)
Guide/Lineup name: Not sure?
Using XMLTV?: No?
Channel number/Name: All that I’ve tried
The title pretty much says it all. Every channel I tune to starts buffering over and over and over, and is unwatchable. If I wait for a show to record to completion, it plays fine in both the web player and the Samsung player (although it does take a long time to buffer initially). I tried tweaking some of the playback settings, but nothing seems to have helped. What else can I try to get Live TV working properly?
Web player can’t direct play/stream mpeg2 so it will need to transcode, probably the same occurring for the Samsung tv.
You can monitor the dashboard with the Web app while you play something on the TV to see what the streams is doing on the server. Local quality should be original and if there is an mpeg2 box it should be checked.
@pl_5309 Thank you for the reply! When I check the dashboard it does say 1080i (MPEG2VIDEO) and 1080P (H264) Transcode. I don’t see any checkboxes there.
I tried again changing the Quality settings on the playback to be something lower 720 HD, but then nothing was showing up.
Anything else I can try to get things working correctly?
I have android tv on xiaomi mi box, and was unable to watch over 5 minutes of live tv via Plex. My Roku, on my wifes tv was fine. It wasn’t the server. It was the player.
I found a “beta” update (recommended by someone on plex forum) and sideloaded it on the mi box. No more buffering, fixed! So if your smart tv is running android tv, you could try the beta. Worked for me.
Unless we find a talented plug-in developer here to plug this in to plex, as this is basically how you get mpeg2 TS files to play in modern browsers like Chrome, Edge Chromium, Firefox etc
Such a plug-in would need to create the m3u8 file on the fly if the DVB-T or DVB-C receiver is not creating it itself., the MPEG2 file should still work with it.
@pl_5309 Thanks for the idea. I tried the Plex app for Windows, and it looked like it might work okay for a bit, then I started getting “could not tune channel” errors that have persisted, and now playback doesn’t work in any client
To troubleshoot those channel tuning errors I installed the Hauppage WinTV app just to see if it worked okay, and it does. No problem tuning anything and it takes way less time than Plex did to buffer when changing channels.
The server I’m using is not powerful at all, it’s an old Celeron 1.4Ghz processor with 6GB of RAM. It worked fine when using Windows Media Center and a different tuner card for over-the-air HD TV, so I assumed it would work okay with Plex, too. Guess I assumed wrong!
@deanerino Thank you for the suggestion! I tried looking through the Samsung TV app for an option to enable beta installs, but couldn’t find one. Truth be told I don’t know what the Samsung TV runs as an OS, but the Plex app there looks the same as all the other ones.
I’d definitely prefer to get the Samsung TV Plex app working, as that’d allow us to consildate to a single remote for our entertainment purposes. It’s looking less and less likely that Plex is going to work out for me, though, which is too bad.
Recording doesn’t use much CPU. When Plex implemented the feature to allow tuner sharing via a server proxy, the CPU requirements went up. That plus the default of most of the clients is h.264 causes a transcode to happen. Is your Celeron new enough to have QSync support or do you have a discrete GPU that can do mpeg2 to h.2.64? Curious, when you say it takes a long time to tune how long is that. With an HDHR quattro I am seeing 5 seconds with Plex and maybe 4.5 seconds with the HDHR app.
Right now Hauppauge cards are having trouble with any server version after 1.19 and the Plex for Windows client is also having Live TV issues after version 1.18. I would say hang in there.
