My live tv stream freezes frequently while watching live tv. I also have several recordings to my DVR and they all get recorded just fine.
I am using HDHomeRun Extend and my signal strength is 100 across the board as measured by the HDHomeRun signal strength tool… Every so often I will see a “Weak Signal” popup during the live tv display but I know that is totally erroneous. I have TV;s connected the the antenna directly and they work fine for all channels.
My plex server is a windows PC with an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 with 16GB of ram. System utilization falls well below 20% all the time.
Can someone help me figure out why the live tv stream freezes? I’m attaching my server and database logs which I hope help.
Does anyone even look at this forum? If you report a live-tv error is it just ignored because everyone knows it is so buggy that there is no hope in fixing it?
I get freezes, too, especially if I start a program that is recording from the beginning and try to fast forward through commercials. It is almost unusable on either my android tv, fire stick 4K, or Xbox one. I also use HDHomeRun as my tuner.
I like the interface and just about everything better about Plex vs. Hdhomerun dvr except the freezing and slowness to start watching a channel. Sure would be nice to see a response from the Plex team since I am paying for the Plex pass!
I have totally given up on Plex DVR and live TV. I am also seeing sound missing on some recordings. I think Plex live TV and DVR is just not a sound product. Also there is absolutely no support which is just not acceptable for me.
I have switched to tablo and am very happy with it. All the features of Plex and more importantly it is solid and there is tech support.
I have used PLEX for a few years and the movie and indexing component is good. I recently, about a year ago, setup an HDHomeRun Quattro and enabled PLEXs TV-DVR feature, and I can with full confidence say it’s absolute trash. Don’t waste your time even spending time using it. If you found this topic and are reading this post, I am you and you are me. We are brothers and as your brother I am here to say delete it now. It sucks.
It constantly freezes and pixels out
It says weak signal which is an absolute bs message as my app on ipad, and iphone running at the same time as I have a 4 tuner box, run fine when it shows “weak signal”
3 Attempting to manage play back rewind etc etc on live TV blows up in my face and if the hour mark has passed, say 4:00pm It freaks out and you’ll lose your position.
The guide is clumsy and always off time and looks like you’re reading an old newspaper.
To be honest it just feels like this part of the app needs a whole rewrite.
I went with Channels DVR and yeah it sucks paying $80 a year for yet another thing when it should work with PLEX pass but it hooks up into any device as a NAS. I personally run it in a container on Portainer with a huge volume oddly right next to where Plex data is stored. The UI for the Channels App is VERY good, clean, comfortable to the eyes, smooth. It might lack some of the DVR management features that PLEX uses, like delete after x days after played and such but to be honest, the DVR and Live TV of PLEX was so bad those features didn’t matter. I just need a good interface that works and give me basic things, like live play back and recording a TV show…without the dreaded stutter, freezing and the all of a sudden fast forward and audio/video out of sync issues.
Dump this part of the Plex experience. You’ll be happier for it, not to mention these issues have been ongoing for at least 2 years from what I can read and it’s not any better.
I looked at maybe getting Tablo as well but using a local drive was a deal breaker for me. I think most of us here want to leverage the storage we have for things, and prefer better resiliency that our NAS or storage devices provide over network.
It sounds like we are in agreement with Plex live-tv and the fact it is trash. I have been using Tablo for about 2 months and love it. All the Plex problems are gone. I highly recommend Tablo as a way to handle live TV.
I know this is no help and you all have moved on but the common thing I see between all the posts is the home run devices.
I run a Intel I7 4770K 16GB all SSD’s and 2 Hauppauge 2250 pci-e dual tuners that feed tv to every tv in my house thru Roku devices fire tablets iPhone etc I can run every device with live tv and it has run flawless.
I’ve run 10 devices with live tv and doesn’t max out my server.
So…I just got Plex Pass and the HomeRun Duo. I am experiencing this exact issue too – and it is totally ruining my triumphant separation from post-Playstation Vue services.
I have seen tens of posts on this issue going back until 2017. It does seem as jhoalt76 states, that the issue reside solely with users of the HomeRunHD devices.
I should note that, from the forum posts, the issue seems to be the marriage of Plex and HomeRun. My experience supports this theory, as the HomeRun HD Duo works entirely fine with the HomeRun app on a FireTV. In contrast, the same device with Plex freezes.
Can anyone out there seeing this message confirm/deny that they are seeing live tv freezes with the Hauppauge devices (preferably, the dual USB HD tuner!)?
In the alternative, if someone has the HomeRun working with Plex for LiveTV and DVR, please report your settings here?
I am getting one in a few days and will report back how it does compared to the HomeRun on Plex (as noted above, the HomeRun does fine with the HomeRun app).
I have Plex Media Server running on an Intel NUC running Proxmox hypervisor running in a Debian Buster VM. I also have it interfaced to an HDHomeRun Duo and I have the same freezing issue with Live TV. If I use the native HDHomeRun app to watch TV, I have no issues. I’d rather use Plex but not if it’s going to be this unreliable. When I use the DVR feature, this usually works fine. I don’t understand why live tv freezes but recording live tv works much better? Makes no sense!
Ok I figured this out - at least with my setup. Apparently, Intel NIC drivers struggle to keep up with the amount of UDP/TCP packets that can be generated when watching live TV. My setup is as follows:
Server - Intel NUC i5-5250U, 16 GB Ram, 250GB SSD, 2TB Toshiba External USB 3.1 drive (for my media)
Hypervisor - Proxmox 6.1 (This hypervisor is based on Debian Buster)
Number of Guest VMs: 2
Plex Media Host OS: This is a VM on Proxmox running Debian Buster 10 as well,
Linux Kernel version: Formerly 4.9.xxx (now Kernel 5.3 on Proxmox and the Debian guest VM)
Plex client hardware: HP Laptop, iPad, Android Phones, Roku sticks, Firesticks
Live TV converter: HDHomeRun Duo (Gen 5 but also happened with my Gen 4).
Define the problem: While watching Live TV, the video freezes at random times. This occurs across all clients. Sometimes a ‘Weak connection’ error is displayed or maybe not. If I waited long enough, the video would eventually resume. (Kudos to Plex for making it recover even when a network connection was lost).
Other symptoms I discovered along the way: When live TV would freeze, any active SSH connections to the VM would disconnect. I also could not ping the VM when it would freeze.
Root cause: Through some investigating on the web, I found out that there is a kernel bug in the driver for the Intel NIC prevalent in any version of the kernel less than 5.3. The bug was forcing my NIC card to restart randomly due to buffer overruns when receiving too many TCP/UDP packets from my HDHomeRun and sending to clients.
Specific error in hypervisor syslog:
Feb 18 12:40:12 pve kernel: e1000e 0000:00:19.0 enp0s25: Detected Hardware Unit Hang:
TDH
TDT <0>
next_to_use <0>
next_to_clean
buffer_info[next_to_clean]:
time_stamp <1001b2b1b>
next_to_watch
jiffies <1001b3368>
next_to_watch.status <0>
MAC Status <80083>
PHY Status <796d>
PHY 1000BASE-T Status <3c00>
PHY Extended Status <3000>
PCI Status <10>
Fix: I had to upgarde the linux kernel versions to the latest releases on both my Proxmox hypervisor OS, and my Debian Buster VM hosting Plex. The latest kernel comes with a patched driver for the Intel NIC in my hardware. I also had to make sure my Debian VM was configured from Proxmox to use the specific Intel driver (called the INTEL e1000 from the network card dropdown menu). This forced my VM to use the Intel driver (which should now work after the kernel upgrade).
Supporting links:
Results since fix implemented:
So far I’ve been running live TV from my FireStick and haven’t seen one random freeze for the last 6 hours. That is by far a new record. Fingers crossed.
This was my experience with this problem. I posted this hoping that it might help somebody else out there with the same issue. Trust me, I know how frustrating this can be.
Correction. I meant to reply to the post referring to the Intel NIC card resets
Wow. So glad I stumbled on this post. I was ready to ditch this whole live TV DVR and move on to another option. I currently have a Dell Precision Tower 3630 running windows 10 1903 for my server. HD homerun for the tuner. I use an SSD for boot and the temp drive and I have 30TB for all of the content. There are two NICS in the box. One Intel I219-LM and a Broadcom NetXtreme. Been in IT for 30 years I have never liked Intel for my servers and they make horrible wifi cards. So naturally I have had the Broadcom card connected. Dummy me I never checked the driver version on it. Microsoft win10 supplied 2017. So after reading your post I switched over to the Intel card and put on 12.18.9.10 driver dated 7/25/19. All of the problems are now GONE! no pixelization, lockups, lag etc. I left a channel running live TV program overnight. and woke up this morning to it still playing on my bedroom TV. That never made it more than 10 minuets before that would lock up. Now I will say the fire TV client does play a roll in this when it comes to connection strength to the streaming box. In my not so scientific testing before the NIC change in my bedroom the WIFI signal as reported by my Fire TV was only good. I would play a DVR episode that would break up constantly. and yet on my laptop on the web client in the same room it would play fine. I know this is not apples to apples. All kinds of variables here. But when I changed over to the Intel NIC I was still getting a little bit of audio / video drops outs but the stream would recover in the bedroom with the only good WIFI signal. I switched it over to a Ethernet over power 100mb connection and the problem was resolved. I don’t think the Android client can buffer for sh*t. Hope this helps others and or a Plex engineer sees this. They obviously can’t foresee all of the variables out there but they can certainly make a better client. I have had zero issues watching anything else I put on my server. Just this Live TV / DVR option.
It’s good to hear this helped fix your problem. I’m sure there is a strong correlation of Plex users experiencing this problem and also using an Intel NIC in their servers. Since my driver upgrade, I’ve not had 1 drop and I’m loving it!
I’ve read that Amazon Fire devices have notoriously crappy wifi hardware. I have a Fire Stick but it works fine connected to my 5-ghz band. If it’s not built-in to the TV, maybe you could replace it with a NVIDIA Shield down the road. Happy Plexing!
Well I can tell you that Realtek is the bargain basement of network cards. That said you are correct. They should be able to fix the client which has obvious issues.
What I can tell you is that I have an ASUS motherboard and have had motherboards from ASUS for over 15 years. Many of them have had Realtek NIC’s installed. I don’t buy your bargain basement comment. I think the bargain basement comment should really apply to PLEX’s implementation of a LIVE TV product.
I discovered another setting that i changed after it was all working that ended up hurting myself. I started playing with the transcoder settings and changed very fast to fast for better video quality. I have a decent system and figured it shouldn’t be a problem. Well live tv went to total pixelation freeze up hell until I put it back. Just an FYI for those that are still having issues and if you changed that setting you may want to experiment and put it back to default to see what happens.
