Server Version#: 1.18.9.2571
Player Version#: AppleTV / Chrome on PCs
Tuner Make/Model: HDHomeRun Extend (Also have CONNECT available)
Guide/Lineup name: Unsure
Using XMLTV?: No
Channel number/Name: All
Content Source: HD Homerun Extend
Symptom: Playback is choppy, pixelated and delayed at times.
Looking for some recommendations, or if I should not plan on this at all.
I went with the NUC7PJYH platform based on some other feedback to try to get some hardware transcoding. I had a different server that TV playback didn’t work well (AMD Ryzen 2700x/Proxmox/Cheap old video card - not passed into VM, Ubuntu 18.04).
Ok, back to the NUC7PJYH.
HW is NUC7PJYH with 8 GB RAM on a single stick (could this be an issue??). Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop installed on the NUC, which can be a server off in the corner. I went with the desktop flavor to make sure video drivers get loaded up. All remove devices connect over hardwired 1 Gbps LAN connections with Cisco switch (verified virtually no errors <10 per interface) are on the ports.
Ideally I would store my media on a QNAP TS-251+. I have tried both NAS and local storage. I also have tried a RAMDISK for transcoding storage.
Maybe I should just pony up and get a good solid system with a modern Intel processor. But looking to see what thoughts are. Should I try Ubuntu 16.04 instead? Server flavor instead?
What is the processor in the NUC? My server is about 3 years old now and runs an Intel® Core™ i5-7400 CPU @ 3.00GHz. I have a Hauppauge PCIe WinTV-quadHD tuner connected to a powered antenna. I get good reception and OTA viewing and recording.
I’m not sure having a beefier system would solve the problem (Though it’s always nice to have)
I’m running a Synology DS918+ (Intel Celeron J3455) with a HD HomeRun Quatro. I direct play Live TV to my Apple TV 4K with no issues.
Do you have the enhanced player enabled on the ATV?
It could be a weak signal or the problem with the driver “/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/lib/dri/iHD_drv_video.so” that needs to be removed till they get it working.
RAM drives can cause other problems with Live TV especially since you only have 8 GB of ram.
I did have the enhanced player turned on. Turning it off and I get a little better playback but still pixelated.
Removing the RAMDISK and just using the SSD for the transcoding directory there is still pixelation. I will gather some logs here shortly (and I’ll also take a closer look at them).
@jwrober thanks for that. Generally reception is good as well. The processor is
Intel® Pentium® Silver J5005 Processor (4M Cache, up to 2.80 GHz). Base rate is at 1.5 GHz.
When watching live TV it jumps around a little bit, from 800 MHz to somewhere about 2 GHz.
Try deleting the following file (back it up elsewhere first) and then restarting PMS:
/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/lib/dri/iHD_drv_video.so
There was a known issue several months back where using the newer iHD dri driver could cause the issues you describe; falling back to the older i965 driver seemed to correct it. I thought this had been corrected in newer releases, but it may not have been.
Unfortunately no. As far as I know the underlying cause had to do with the new driver from Intel themselves, not anything Plex was doing (other than defaulting to using it). I didn’t follow the issue very closely, but there were at least a few threads about it.
I thought this bullet-point from 1.18.7.2415 was intended to address it, but it appears not in at least some cases:
(Transcoder) Hardware encoding on older Intel processors could produce very low-quality output in some cases. (#10863)
Just for clarity, the enhanced player on the Apple TV is what would allow the stream to Direct Play. So I would suggest turning it back on unless there are other issues caused by it.
i experienced almost the same issue with this hardware, but i found the problem only started with running server version 1.18 or above. Any 1.17 version works fine still.
