So I am pretty new to Plex DVR and Live TV… However, I have been using Plex for awhile now. Live TV may take a couple seconds to load (especially the 1080i channels), but plays fine once loaded. I can even pause and play TV (with no buffer).
Then I go to watch a recorded TV show, and it plays smooth for about 3-5 seconds, and just hangs until I give up on it. I monitor my vmware stats (CPU and Memory usage) and it does spike in CPU.
I have my Plex running on Ubuntu Server 17.10. It is installed on a virtual host. I have provisioned 8 CPUs and 16 GB or RAM (it was 4 and 8, but I was just testing). Its running on a pretty beefy host. However, the OS is installed on an SSD, while the Data is stored on an NFS drive. Could it be an I/O issue? Maybe the NFS drive is the bottle neck?
What is the client you are using to view your Live TV and recorded streams?
Are you running any post processing?
I use android TV with no media transcoding in my post processing script and HDHomeRun Prime tuner. Live TV playback plays smoothly with no transcoding. Playback of a recorded stream requires direct streaming (container conversion because the android tv apparently can’t play .ts container) and that performance is awful. I get a lot of very frequent buffering or stuttering, skipping forward/backward is time consuming and sometimes causes the client to jump huge amounts of time or crash altogether. I have to set a full stream transcode by specifying a quality setting to transcode to in order to properly play the file. Its not ideal and as soon as I have time I’m going to rewrite my post processing script to convert the container for storage which should resolve my issue.
I would highly recommend downloading Plex Media Player from the main site and giving that a shot. I’m not a fan of watching things through the web interface for this very reason.
