Gigabit ethernet full duplex into a Unifi managed gigabit PoE switch to managed unifi access points
Average CPU load is around 15% when running live TV
HDHomeRun Extend - Signal is on average 85-100% and signal quality is 95-100% on average OTA with roof mounted antenna.
Roku Streaming Stick+ (3810x) via WiFi.
When I attempt to run Live TV in plex I am getting a TON of random buffering pauses making it frustrating to the point its unusable. However if I watch the same channels via the HDHomeRun app on the roku it is flawless. This tells me that the issue is not network / tuner / antenna, but rather something with plex.
I’ve tried No Transcoding, Heavy, and Mobile High Quality 30fps max encoding without any improvements. I do see when it goes to “buffering” that the inbound traffic is still as expected (3-10 mbps depending on profile) on the network port, but outbound traffic drops to a couple kb/sec. Again I am not seeing CPU utilization spiking above say 10-15% on the server.
Any ideas what is going on and how to make this usable?
I see a similar issue with my setup where things play great through HDHomeRun but plex has a lot of micro-pauses when playing through web or android. Pausing the live TV for a few seconds and then unpausing seems to help.
EDIT: specified that I see the same issue on web and android
Yes. I enabled mpeg-2 on the Roku and set transcoding on the Extend to “Original” which should keep the MPEG-2 rather that using the hardware transcoder built into the extend.
I just don’t get it how it works so well in the HDHomerun App but the stutters in plex just ruins the experience especially since it takes several seconds to buffer again. Unfortunately everything else about the HDHomerun app sucks so that is not likely to be a work around in terms of the Wife Acceptance Factor.
This post explains in part a major issue I’ve had on-going for multiple years with Live TV & DVR, and I am not a Roku user.
This seems very much like an issue with how plex handles the tuner stream & tries to provide that to ANY plex client. I’ve had this issue on web, plex & pmp apps for windows, android & android tv, fire tv plex clients. It seems like it also affects roku, so its a good chance its a server process issue too.
Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll get a TV stream to play well for the entirety of the episode.
Sometimes it’ll play for a minutes and buffer forever, sometimes it breaks and buffers during commercials (codec switch?). Sometimes I’ll be able to play for hours, then try to switch a channel & within a few minutes the stream starts to try to buffer and/or eventually dies in an endless buffer loading circle.
This is extremely difficult in my mind to get the timing on the logs properly.
Since you successfully debugged my previous issue, is this something you can reproduce, or tell me how I can start an extended logging session just for Live TV & DVR so we can, as a community, once and for all squash these bugs & get Plex’s Live TV & DVR working as we all desire.
I am willing to provide access to my tuner, or try to capture video of what happens to give further information, as well as PM’ing logs. Feel free to send a PM my way.
+1 for trying this approach from @kegbeach to delete codecs. In the past this had resolved failed recording issues for me as well. The needed codecs will re-download.
I’ve had similar issues with constant micro buffering on Live TV & DVR mainly when the channel has HE-AAC audio and nuking the Codecs folder resolves the issue. There’s been a few threads with similar issues as this one where I have had them delete the Codecs folder with success.
Excellent! Given the number of quirks this resolves, you have motivated me to put in a cron job to delete these once a month during off hours. It almost seems to be best practice for Plex Live TV & DVR.
Thanks I do not have the micro-buffering issue en masse like others have reported.
That can occasionally happen, but not as much as the rest of the buffering issue.
I can delete codecs and report back as requested.
Also, new issue started recently too where the tuner video stream goes black, audio works, then starts to mess with the stream again.
Also, if this is attributed to live tv & dvr issues, why is plex not clearing the codecs folder when it updates the contents? That seems like a no brainer, given this is within plex’s application structure & have 100% permission on a user & group basis to modify the contents of this folder
It’s compatibility issues between the server codecs and the client codecs I imagine. The fix would be for them to figure out the conflict and patch it but it would take some serious troubleshooting.
I’m having a similar problem. HD Home Run working smooth on my Apple TV using the official app.
Watching Live TV from Plex is painful, it stutters every few minutes. It stutters even on recorded broadcasts! But doesn’t stutter at all when using a different Plex client, such as Tizen, iOS or macOS. I really can’t pinpoint what would cause it.
