I’m looking for a reliable remote Live TV / DVR solution and was thinking the WD PR2100 would be the best solution for reliability and remote administration rather than something PC based.
I just want to make sure that the DVR / Live TV is enabled on the Western Digital build since they are an official Plex partner.
Live TV is more of a streaming device issue. It works on Android (not Amazon) devices and a few others. Not Roku. Not Amazon Firexxx. The DVR, which is separate, has a record engine that runs on most NASs.
Anybody else that can give a more in-depth dissertation?
Live Tv does require transcoding to many mobile devices, if you are not streaming to a device that can play natively your server needs to be strong enough to transcode. From the Watching live tv limitations section.
low power NAS may not be able to transcode live tv if needed. Looking at the PR2100 and 4100 they seem to ave a processor that they claim can transcode for plex.
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/115007689648-Watching-Live-TV
Limitations
There are some limitations when watching live TV currently:
Live TV viewing cannot currently be shared. Only the Plex Media Server owner account can currently watch live TV.
_ Live TV requires the ability to transcode the content, so you need to ensure you run Plex Media Server on a device capable of transcoding. (Some NAS devices may not be able to transcode.)_
Closed-captioning or alternate audio channels are not currently supported for Live TV.
Flinging or casting playback to another Plex app is not currently supported.
You cannot initiate a recording of what you’re currently watching in the client. If you wish to start recording, you’ll need to stop live playback and then start recording.
@BRBMan Yeah. What I’m building here will require transcoding. I’ll be using a Verizon USB modem, which they throttle to “3G speed” after 10GB. I hoping this translates to at least 1.5Mbps… This is a temporary setup for a few months until we get to a permanent home in another state.
What I’m doing is parking a small Plex server at my dad’s house to hold us over until we get established for TV. I’ll be using one of my HD Homerun Prime’s and Plex for live TV and DVR. It just needs to handle one stream from whatever the incoming resolution is down to 480p. The receiving device will be my gawd awful Apple TV4 that has been doing nothing for the past 6 months.
I’m actually testing the setup at this very moment. I’m using a Gigabyte BRIX N2807. Supposedly that SoC has QSV but I am not able to get it to use it. So the poor little 800 Passmark CPU is not quite powerful enough to knock it out with the software encoder. But it’s doing much better than I expected it to! Only pausing 2 or 3 seconds every 10 or 15 seconds.
I have my laptop hooked up to my Verizon USB modem with Internet Connection Sharing enabled and the Apple TV plugged directly into the Ethernet jack.
So it’s going out to the internet through my cable internet, and coming back through my Verizon modem.
I tested the PR2100 and… Yes it worked. But the transcoding quality was hideous! For whatever reason, the quality setting has been removed from the Western Digital build of PMS and it didn’t matter if I used hardware or software transcoding it was completely unwatchable.
So I took it back and exchanged it for a QNAP 251+. Saved me $70 and this unit is doing exactly what I need it to do. I installed the hardware transcoding build on it and it works just as good as the Western Digital unit. Still looks horrible so I’m using the software transcoder and it looks great.
@kd6icz I am using the PR2100 and I can watch live TV on my tmobile LTE network when I am out and about. The quality looks great. The DVR recording quality looks great. Any time it doesn’t look good it is because the signal for that channel sucks and has nothing to do with plex or the hardware. I flipped on the transcoding and I’ve never heard the fans be so loud on the machine, but it doesn’t bother me. An hour video is about 5GB so I am not sure how much space is being saved with the transcoding during recording, however, whatever it is doing makes it work just fine over a mobile network.
@johndavies24 said:
@kd6icz I am using the PR2100 and I can watch live TV on my tmobile LTE network when I am out and about. The quality looks great. The DVR recording quality looks great. Any time it doesn’t look good it is because the signal for that channel sucks and has nothing to do with plex or the hardware. I flipped on the transcoding and I’ve never heard the fans be so loud on the machine, but it doesn’t bother me. An hour video is about 5GB so I am not sure how much space is being saved with the transcoding during recording, however, whatever it is doing makes it work just fine over a mobile network.
Two questions. Are you using the latest build of PMS and the latest firmware for the NAS?
Also, do you see the transcoding quality setting in the transcoder settings menu? (Automatic, Prefer lower quality, prefer higher quality, make my CPU hurt)
I am always using the latest build of PMS (it needs to be sideloaded from a *.bin file, rather than through the defunct WD app store). But I also kind of have to use the latest PMS because I am using new plex pass features that are constantly improved and updated. I am using the latest NAS firmware, also critical because there has only been 3 total in over a year (the first was out of box update) and the WD my cloud is buggy as hell.
The newer PMS builds do not have the make my CPU hurt mode in the settings. But it does have a toggle for hardware transcoding.
@johndavies24 said:
I am always using the latest build of PMS (it needs to be sideloaded from a *.bin file, rather than through the defunct WD app store). But I also kind of have to use the latest PMS because I am using new plex pass features that are constantly improved and updated. I am using the latest NAS firmware, also critical because there has only been 3 total in over a year (the first was out of box update) and the WD my cloud is buggy as hell.The newer PMS builds do not have the make my CPU hurt mode in the settings. But it does have a toggle for hardware transcoding.
I think we are talking apples and oranges here. I’m gathering your media collection is all H.264 and using hardware transcoding appears to be decent when going H.264 (hw) to H.264 (hw).
The issue with hardware transcoding is when using DVR. 70% of cable systems and 100% of over the air is MPEG2. From my testing, Plex uses software to decode MPEG2 and hardware to encode H.264.
Looks like: MPEG2VIDEO to H.264 (hw)
That combination is awful! Especially when you don’t have the “Make my CPU hurt” or " Prefer higher quality" options. The QNAP and Windows builds still have those options and I hope they’re never removed!
I don’t know why hardware isn’t used for MPEG2VIDEO decode. All versions of QSV support decode of MPEG2.
Anyway, I’m happy with my little setup and it’s going to be installed in it’s permanent home this weekend.
You clearly understand all this stuff better than I do. I know all my TV is mpeg and I can watch it on my phone when I’m out and about. I wish I bought the H264 version of hd home run but whatever. The final format for my recordings is mpeg as well, even though I checked off the setting to attempt to reduce file size by transcoding (it’s possible I figured this may convert to h264 but it didn’t). I am not sure what format the live stream is in but I’d bet money it’s also mpeg
