Live TV/DVR should be removed as one of the advertised features of a Plex Pass

Live TV & DVR
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After a brutal experience with Live TV/DVR in 2018 which culminated with me getting a refund for my lifetime pass, I gave Plex a 2nd chance in June 2020 and bought a lifetime pass again. At no time since then have I had anything remotely like a stable/reliable TV/DVR system. The problems have been constant and many of the worst issues have been there since I got the pass – inability to “Play From Start” on android devices being an obvious issue (but there are quite a few issues that have been outstanding for months that are basically feature breaking). And if Plex responds at all to the longstanding reports, it is rarely more than “we have nothing more to report at this time”. The clear implication is that Plex has no intention of fixing these problems - they have already had ample time times 10 to work on and fix the Android issue. I’m a developer and it just doesn’t take a year to figure out why we can’t play from the start. It’s obvious that resources are being devoted to other things.

Given that, it is borderline fraudulent (if not actually fraudulent) to be advertising Live TV/DVR as a feature of the plex pass when everyone knows that it cannot be used reliably by a significant percentage of the user base. Plex should stop advertising Live TV/DVR as a feature. It doesn’t work and there does not appear any commitment to get it to work.

I plan to complain to the Google and Amazon app stores because of Plex’s behaviour on this matter. Plex is advertising a service, taking our money for that service and then not providing the service.

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This should also be posted in this thread:

Also have never had a consistently good experience with the Live TV & DVR feature.

It even fails to work properly on the PC/web, let alone on any streaming device.

I too purchased plexpass lifetime just for the Live TV & DVR feature, yet this continues to never work when needed.

@elan any chance you can actually comment on ANYTHING related to Live TV & DVR development? From our perspective, Plex as a company is pushing away the people that keep giving you chances.

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A part of the problem with Live TV & DVR is that when Plex grabs on to one of the tuners on my WinTV-dualHD tuner and is recording on the other then it does not let go so if I try to change channels it will fail because there are not available tuners. HOW? I am on 1, drop it and move to the new channel.

Plex seems more concerned about being a viable option for cord cutters by offering Free TV/Movies like Pluto TV, Tubi and others but I agree with you @MovieWiz , focus on your offerings and make them rock solid.

You say that you have been a developer for a long time, similarly I have decades of QA experience and when you compare the offerings by Plex and compare to something like a DirecTV or Comcast DVR offering Plex falls short:

  • Unreliable experience, my shield stops recording every fews days and it needs to be rebooted. That issue, not necessarily on the shield has existed for years, here is my topic on it: Recording failed. Please check your tuner or antenna
  • The shield does not display closed captioning on recordings. My Windows 10 box does it just fine and this has been a known issue for years. Pluto TV just last week was fined for not fixing the issue of no CC displaying - ViacomCBS, Pluto TV To Pay $3.5 Million Fine To FCC Over Violations – Deadline. I do not have any problems hearing, I just like to have the CC.
  • My Shield is recording shows with AC3 audio but the Shield does not Direct stream AC3 so it needs to encode it. Why record with an unsupported format?
  • Why does Plex need to get fancy? Some times playback gets a glitch and we cannot go back in a file so we need to stop playback and start again. When restarted we can go back. My shield is on the same, wired connection as my Windows PC where I will play from, or the recordings are right there on the shield, why can’t it play?
  • Layout? When I open a show that has > 1 recording or > 1 season, there is a lot of padding between where the Play/resume buttons are and the 'DVD cover. That padding pushes the ‘DVD cover’ down enough that you cannot see the Seasons. WHY? This is a stupid UI issue that should take a developer 5 minutes to adjust. 5 minutes would include checking in the code & getting a Code Review done on it.

Before offering an array of fancy new features, make your offerings more solid, a better offering to current customers because it is cheaper to keep your customers than it is to go out and get news ones.

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Concerning the recording in AC3 issue, I don’t think Plex can do much about that. Most DVR software records in the native format that’s on the signal. For OTA TV in North America, that’s MPEG2 video and AC3 audio. You can force a transcode after the recording is complete but it’s not wrong or strange that Plex is recording AC3.

Also, just because it is recording on the shield doesn’t mean it will be played on the shield. It’s quite possible that the content will be played on another client that does direct play AC3. Also, you lose quality when you transcode AC3 to something else (say AAC). It would be wrong for Plex to do that automatically unless you asked for it to happen.

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Over the past 3 years I have been trying to get the Live TV feature of Plex to work properly. It never fully has. Pleading with developers and staff gives no response. Development has focused on the free streaming (which Plex gets a cut of), so they have no further interest in fixing the Live TV features.
The family and I have been getting so frustrated with the situation that I finally decided to try alternatives…

First tried the free NextPVR…which works, but doesn’t have all the features and is really rough around the edges both server and client-wise. The $7.99 android app for NextPVR didn’t work at first until the developer provided me a separate download that I had to sideload into my NVidia ShieldTV Pro. Decided it wasn’t what I wanted and tried Emby.

Emby is a good alternative, but found that it didn’t have commercial skip. Additionally, found that navigation while playing a recording is rough. When you skip ahead, many times it doesn’t want to skip. Worse yet, found that skipping ahead left the audio/video very unsynced (it wasn’t even close)…which is a big negative from the wife. Sadly, gave up on Emby.

Looked at Channels DVR and although $80/yr. decided to give it a try. Loaded it up (first time incorrectly in my case) and ran it through it’s paces. It is rock solid. Perfect recordings. Commercial skip is figured out even if you are watching the recording while live. Skipping ahead or instant replay is super fast. Audio/Video sync is perfect regardless of watching on ShieldTV, Fire stick or web. Records OTA and Philo (among many others) shows. Biggest negative is that it won’t work on Roku, but for $33 moved to a 4K Fire stick. So, I’m very happy I made the choice to go with Channels DVR. I still keep Plex for everything else, but have completely removed Live TV/Recorded TV from Plex as it is just not good and development doesn’t want to fix the issues. I wish they would look into resolving them, but not counting on it as it has been years now…

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Agree 100% (Lifetime subscriber here, solely for live TV/DVR). There seems to be a constant introduction of crap, that Plex seems to feel that is wanted without regard to getting the core offering actually working as advertised.

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It’s honestly amazing how much a company can neglect and insult it’s paying customers. I foolishly purchased a lifetime pass while it was on sale, thinking that I’d be using the live TV features soon enough. Life happened and it was about a year before I tried it out, and then I literally spent days trying to troubleshoot all of Plex’s software issues since at first I was thinking they must be hardware issues on my end. Nope, Plex is just that bad. Freezing at 3 min past the hour every hour. Freezing if paused for more than 5 minutes, and the black screen bug infecting every other show my kids watched. I’ve been in software development for over 2 decades now and cannot recall another company that was this pitiful. And to top it off, they apparently have never heard of regression testing considering that many of these bugs remain for many months if not years, only to be “fixed” and then reappear just a few weeks later. There’s no legit excuse for this - someone at Plex should have been fired long ago. I’m not sure if it’s the CTO @elan who’s just that bad at managing things, or the lone Android developer they seem to have. Regardless, someone is terrible at their job.
If anyone has recently purchased a Plex pass and you’re having trouble with live TV: Call your credit card company and ask to file a chargeback for false advertising, then look into a real company like Channels DVR or Emby if you care about live TV. Plex is definitely not the answer, and at this point they should be charged with fraud. Or at the very least you guys should start paying your users… I would say that you’ve been using us as beta testers, but most betas I’ve seen are at least passable and don’t have this many persistent bugs.

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Well said, I’ve made numerous posts about the DVR/Live TV shambles in the couple of years since I was duped into purchasing a lifetime pass on the promise of the DVR “service”.

Nobody cares, the product is bordering on bloatware now as Plex strive to monetise anything and everything while the core product is a failure, especially on Android. Right now I have my son moaning that he has the old spinning circle on Android TV and can’t watch his show…

As before I’ve said it… USELESS. A continuously bug ridden mess.

Buyer beware prospective Plex Pass purchasers!

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Uh, perhaps instead of spending a bunch of money on lifetime a second time, maybe you should have done a 1 month subscription to see if things were to your expectations?

I am not suggesting that there aren’t issues with live tv/dvr, but if you were unhappy the first time, then you might have ‘tested the waters’ before doing a full lifetime commitment a second time and being even more unhappy.

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Yeah, you’ve got a point. I allowed myself to become the victim of an impulse purchase when the plex pass went on sale – and that’s on me. I should have known though since that’s what happened the first time.

To be fair though, I was still using Plex at that time and was happy with the Android app and I was relying on Plex’s statements that they would be refocusing on improving Live TV/DVR – but it was all a lie. Also, I unfortunately bought the pass around the same time that Plex began a new campaign of aggressive apathy to the needs of its userbase – especially to Android app users and to Live TV/DVR users. Every release introduced new glitches and it seemed like nothing ever got fixed. They still haven’t worked out the bugs of the new home screen that were introduced in the abomination that was 8.15.xx Android Apps.

I reinstalled Plex Server just two days ago and tried Live TV/DVR again for the first time in a few months. And it’s pretty rough. Only played with it for about 90 minutes in total on 3 of my Android/FireTV devices. App crashed twice on my FireTV Stick. And on all of the devices, seek might as well be named “Jump to Random location”. I mean it’s just truly pathetic. And it’s been like that each time I’ve tried during the last 15 months.

I’m not being hyperbolic when I say Live TV/DVR should not be advertised as part of the Plex Pass. I really believe that. To me, it’s practically fraudulent that they’re doing that. They are taking money for a service and then not providing that service.

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I am on server Version 1.24.4.5081 I bought in to cord cut… and honestly I have only had 1 hickup… and that is with recording SNL because they replay old stuff repackaged so it looks new than it skips the new one that came right after… I am using a gen 4 i7 windows 10 PC as my server… that I mapped a NAS to as a drive that I record everything to… and the HDHomerun 4 tuner network box…

I know I can’t really offer any support… but I can say that this system relies so much on 3rd party devices for the server… tuner… storage… streaming… transcoding… it’s hard to really troubleshoot…

other than that scheduling stuff that I just record all now… everything has worked fine for me from day one… also I have a 48port switch for my network backbone…

while watching some content my lan usage on the server spikes to over 600mbps (this may just be because I am using the NAS)…

I hope these little tid bits on my working system help you. and as a fellow user I am sorry you are having troubles

I am not here often but if you want any more info on what works I will try to provide comparisons…

they really in need a more comprehensive list of “recommended specs”

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Seems to fit right in with how Plex reps. support there paid users…
…insinuating that the users were stupid to buy there product. (sad but your probably rite)

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Coming from the bleeding edge SimpleTV and then a better North of the border Tablo DVR… I did not have a high bar for PLEX Live TV/DVR. My “lifetime plex pass” is more for access to hardware transcoding and iOS app use. Still, what is said in this thread rings true from my early adopter OTA/DVR experiences.

We are a “never corded” household, so Broadcast TV is essential, whether OTA from an antenna or streamed from a station directly. RIP Aereo. TBD Locast.

I use PLEX to archive my Tablo DVR and work around Tablo problems. PLEX records directly from my Silicondust Extend using a similar costly “PLEX life pass”. I then added disk, J4125 computer, antenna, SSD… PLEX is not as free as it was when I experimented on a Raspberry pi 4.

I purchased “Life” up front to save on $5 monthly passes before committing to “Life”. It worked well for me, but a “discounted upgrade to Life” during the first couple of months would stop overthinking getting “Life” for the absolute least $$.

Quality EPGs are a nightmare on all platforms… and adding cable/satellite guides multiplies the subscription and support costs. Long term PLEX needs revenue for this feature and the “life pass” is arguably an early adopter offer. If Live TV & DVR fails with your equipment, most definitely ask for a refund.

PLEX does not control of the hardware like Tivo or other DVRs.

I toss in Tivo under the " just works" maybe category… if the Tivo ecosystem and licensing work for you…

Is PLEX being fraudulent with player apps that crash using Live TV???

Over the air hardware fits the garbage in garbage out category with wind blown leaves causing kernel panics and reboots! The tuner firmware is a black box to these vendors who then crash and burn on signal fluctuations. Locked HDHomerun tuners, or corrupt data handed to a decoder, will toast your PLEX server. When I had a FireTV Stick, it required regular reboots, well before PLEX.

Compared to the HDHomeRun apps… I’m OK with first light in PLEX.

But yes, PLEX Live TV needs work to make it bomb proof .

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These aren’t hardware issues that people are complaing about, it’s clearly bugs in the Plex software.

Emby, Channels DVR, and Live Channels do not suffer from the plethora of bugs that Plex does. It’s not unreasonable for paid Plex users to expect the software to be reasonably stable.

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Ok, I see you post a lot and I just have to say that I agree with the gist of your points most of the time. But do you really have to belittle people that you don’t agree with you or are hard to understand?

I does appear that @jwpope has had a different experience with OTA hardware than we’ve had. But for sure, he’s used very different hardware than I have.

But I do agree with CodeCat’s point that the concern that Plex users have with their Live TV/DVR is that on very standard hardware, Plex has huge issues with basic functionality that other DVR software handles flawlessly.

I have an Hauppauge PCIe QuadHD tuner on a good Win10 machine and use a FireStick Lite (2020) in the living room to play. And I also two different generic Android TV boxes elsewhere in the house. It’s pretty standard stuff that you would expect it to be handled well.

NextPVR and and Jellyfin worked fantastically in my house. I can always schedule what I want to record and if the EPG is wrong, I can record by channel/time. I can always watch a live recording in progress. I can watch TV live without LiveTV stopping after each program in the EPG ends. And playing a recorded program afterwards always works. The buttons for “Skip Back 10 seconds” and “Skip ahead 30 seconds” always do what they’re supposed to.

Plex’s Live TV/DVR has become a frustration machine for many users with big deficiencies in scheduling, live playback and later playback.

Plex’s prime directive for scheduling appears to be “Never record anything unless Plex can 100% verify that the program doesn’t look like something you have already recorded”. This is so frustrating for users because there is no way to override the prime directive. And there is always going to be mistakes in the EPG. Every other DVR software provides the ability to record by time/channel to work around these regularly occurring problems . Not Plex. And the same crap has been happening for at least 3 years that I’ve seen.

And it’s clear that Plex could not care less about people that record sports. If you can even get the game to schedule, then you either can’t begin playback until the dvr recording has completed or you try to “Watch from the start” only to have it go live and spoil the game for you.

And you’ve got to love the random seeks in the Android app when you try skip back or skip ahead during a live recording.

Plex has all of these problems when the competition does not (even free alternatives work far more reliably than Plex).

Anyway, @jwpope, I hope this helps provide some background to why I started this thread in the first place.

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Thanks all. I did diverge.

I do appreciate that Channels and other software can clearly identify PLEX software as being the problem with LiveTV scrubbing and DVR scheduling failures.

After reading up, I now understand that PLEX made changes that broke previously working DVR configurations & Live TV playback.

On pulling LiveTV & DVR as an advertised part of Plex Pass… PLEX has already sold the functionality and could make it free for trial use for all users, but we don’t want to see LiveTV & DVR become a separate subscription from the Plex Pass we already own. For example, my Tablo DVR lifetime subscription has a separate subscription for commercial skip.

I urge PLEX fix the LiveTV/DVR problems, but PLEX has a long history of just being a Library server that we feed content to.

A second app for LiveTV and DVR may be a long term solution, but Roku/Amazon/Google/Apple all want us to use their voice remotes to have a consolidated content search including LiveTV.

Enjoying my economy PLEX servers (mainly direct stream/play 3-4 Mbit/sec OTA content, but it’s great to have Transcode(hw) on the dashboard).

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I recently got a plex pass for this and massively disappointed.

Experiences with both shield and PC and a wintv-dual HD have been flakey, the highlights:

  • TV scan doesn’t get to 100%
  • A restart is often required to get the tuners to work
  • The Rescan Channels button in the web portal doesn’t work. Deleting the DVR doesn’t delete the cached channel scan, only way to do this is use sql lite and run: DELETE FROM media_provider_resources
  • TV shows constantly fail to record
  • UK user - no hd channels when scanning on the PC, HD channels available on shield
  • Delay changing channels, takes around 5 or so seconds to change channels

Some of the above issues I have seen on this forum since 2018. Its unfortunate as the interface and DVR are good.

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Yes, Plex absolutely should make Live TV/DVR work for the lifetime or annual passholders. But until they can make it work reliably, it should not be advertised as part of the Plex Pass. It’s just plain unethical for Plex to be doing that when everyone knows what crappy shape Live TV/DVR is in right now.

Basically, it’s not right for newcomers to Plex to be cheated thinking that they’re going to get something with a Plex Pass when they won’t.

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@jwpope Sorry. I tend to be rather blunt and my original reply to you above probably did come off a bit rude. That wasn’t my intention and it shouldn’t have been directed at you. I think I let my general annoyance with Plex slip into my reply and that’s my bad.

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Thanks for that. When I start a thread, I try to prevent the degeneration that often that can often happen in forums. And the reaction I get when I try to do that can often be less than ideal. Thanks again.