Really think Plex should include support for IPTV streams as well as physical tuners. What is everyone elses thoughts on this?
Before anyone starts spouting about IPTV streams and the legalities of them I’m just suggesting that they support IPTV streams and xml guides as a format. Plex would be no more encouraging illegal tv streams than they are already encouraging downloading illegally sourced movies and tv shows etc. If Plex had IPTV support then maybe more cable/satelite providers might start offering IPTV subscription services alongside their current cabled options.
2 Likes
xteve works fine with Plex.
Legalities matter to a company so … yea. Development needs to be directed at other core issues that need fixing.
And it is indeed a fine piece of software… but only supports a subset of IPTV streams. That’s not a slam on XTeve. As much as I’d like to use it, it doesn’t receive UDP multicast streams that my ISP/TV delivers, so it’s not a solution for me. UDP multicast makes a lot of sense in my ISP/TV provider’s market (gotta say it does work pretty darned well.)
Unfortunately, I’d suspect that the proportion of IPTV users to overall users is probably quite small. I’m probably in the minority of IPTV users in that I just do not use HTTP[S} streams, and I do have to wonder if my ISP/TV provider has any other Plex users directly receiving streams.
Worse, pulling channels off a coax cable, or OTA, I would think is a bit more defined at the FCC level, IPTV is not defined as well. At least with coax transmission, you’re still getting the bits delivered, just not used. With IPTV, whether by subscription HTTP[S], UDP multicast, etc., unless you’ve got a particular channel/stream running, you’re not getting packets, thus, just getting a channel list just became very difficult. I’m on my own in that regard, I have to keep an STB here, and periodically (maybe annually,) reboot the device and snoop traffic to figure out what channels are at what addresses. I’d be mildly surprised if the EPG provider can get a list of addresses out of an ISP/TV provider like mine for channel mapping. Short story is that I have a rather significant effort in time just to keep a channel mapping in order.
xteve is ok but adds so much overhead to the whole process. IPTV streams start almost instantly with an iptv app but when you use xteve and plex it takes ages for it to buffer and load in the stream so that it starts playing.
On the legality side of things, providing a method to use IPTV streaming natively in plex isnt going to break any laws. The onus on that lies on the person using the IPTV service and whether they are using a legitimate IPTV stream or not. This is no different with FTA services in the UK for instance as a tv licence is needed to watch live tv so you could already say theat plex are enabling illegal tv services by allowing users to stream fta tv without a licence.
2 Likes
Do you use a separate ram drive for Plex and for xteve or do they share a single ram drive for buffer/transcoding etc?
My streams start almost immediately.
Agreed it would be nice to see real IPTV compatibility vrs having to use the HDHR that kinda sucks… 
xTeVe already solves this issue and if you also use tvheadend as the backend then the configuration options are unlimited.
tvheadend → xTeVe → Plex
no it is not the solution to native IPTV support. It’s at best a workaround as it does it but rather crudely by using device emulation to mimic an HDHomerun tuner. It’s quite a clunky process and there are a lot of overheads. Would be far smoother and quicker if Plex just natively supported IPTV and could pass through the streams to the client.
1 Like
your IPTV streams start almost immediately @5stringdeath ? how have you got your IPTV configured? Xteve → Plex?
There is absolutely no difference between using xTeVe or Plex implementing the functionality themselves. It works as intended.
IPTV streams will start as fast as your provider will give them. If they’re taking forever to load then it’s either 1) your configuration or 2) the provider.
And AS A MATTER OF FACT not only do I prefer it this way over Plex implementing it themselves I completely reject the idea of Plex even thinking about doing it. The current options are open source. Both xTeVe and tvheadend can be modified to perform specific ways if needed by anyone. I have modified xTeVe and tvheadend to a certain degree so the functionality is greatly improved and if Plex even had the inkling to implement this 1) we would be at mercy to them and 2) because of that we wouldn’t be able to modify the functionality at will.
That’s a big NO from me.
IPTV streams start really quickly on IPTV app but when going through xteve and into plex it takes ages to start playing. Not sure if this is a plex transcode issue or an issue between xteve and plex but definitely slower than just using native iptv app.
1 Like
There is no issue. The nature of Plex is to buffer ahead before starting playback. So if a few seconds matters to you then you should stick with your other app.
if it were just a few seconds then that would be fine but it seems to take ages where as iptv app is near instant. If Plex natively supported m3u/m3u8 iptv playlists and streams then it could just push the stream straight to the client and it would play instantly rather than messing around with buffering a live stream.
The stream is already pushed to the server. That is all xTeVe does. There is absolutely no need to turn on buffering inside xTeVe. Plex already performs the amount of buffering it needs. If you have buffering turned on in xTeVe then turn it off.
Then all xTeVe does is pass the stream URL to Plex. My streams start up in 1-2 seconds.
Buffering is off in xTeVe. It actually appears like it’s taking just as long on the HDHomerun tuners too so it looks like it’s the issue with ple, taking ages to load when there are multiple tuners and multiple series recordings set. Dunno if there is a way to get round the slow tuning times in plex as it seems to have been reported by quite a few people and @sa2000 said he would get devs to look into it but the topic he mentioned that in has since been closed due to inactivity. I’m suspecting it is a dB issue where the searches have been poorly written. Someone did a test with empty recording schedule and only one mapped channel and was only a couple of seconds to tune a channel but when they added inheir full lineup and set series recordings it went back to 20 to 30 secs loading time.
20 to 30 seconds to load sounds like it’s trying to trancode the stream which isn’t going to work fast on most machines.
Yes. No buffer set in xteve (xteve or ffmpeg) just direct to my provider.
FWIW though, Plex is not my main way to view liveTV as the interface has never been great. I mainly use TiviMate on my Android devices. However Plex works as a remote backup the odd times I need it.
Blockquote If Plex had IPTV support then maybe more cable/satelite providers might start offering IPTV subscription services alongside their current cabled options.
The cable industry, at least in America, already have a standard in place, called TV Everywhere. They are not going to even entertain the idea of an open non-cable labs created standard like IPTV.
Plex just refuses to look into it…oh wait sorry, not refused, They “totally 100% emailed a guy and they didn’t hear back” and close all request threads on it.
ChannelsDVR supports it and it works great.
Doesn’t matter. xTeVe works just fine.
