I have just installed Plex and Live TV is not watchable, the picture is severely degraded and/or repeatedly buffers. Here the details:
PC: 2 x Xeon 6 core processors at 2.0GHz, 16MB RAM, 128GB PCIe SSD, Windows 10
HD Tuner: Silicondust Extend
Player: Roku 2
All hardwired on a 100MB network with no other traffic
Playing through the Silicondust app on the PC is good
Playing through a browser on the PC is unwatchable
Playing on the Roku is similarly bad
Apologies for bumping this but I checked my data rates, the network traffic on the Plex server is a constant 7Mbps inbound from the tuner and a very “spikey” 7 Mbps outbound to the Roku. This is on a 100Mbps hardwired connection, so there should be no bandwidth throttling. The CPU(s) are running at about 10% load so that is not the issue, similarly the disk activity and memory usage are very low…
Without being able to get too technical, if it’s going through Plex, it’s getting transcoded. The Silicon Dust app is able to direct play the stream, so there’s no tax on your processor to display the incoming feed.
I know the Roku requires a transcode because the incoming feed is in a different format than it can work with. The PC… well, not sure why, but it transcodes too.
Long story short, this should help you narrow down the culprit. The stream is pretty big coming in. If you have the Extend, set the transcoder on it to “Heavy” in its interface and see if you don’t get better results. On the Plex side, I’m set to “Highest Quality.”
Apologies for the delay in responding, I was travelling for a couple of days.
AmazingRado24: The Media Server has the following specs: 2 x Xeon 6 core processors at 2.0GHz, 16MB RAM, 128GB PCIe SSD, Windows 10. Surely that should be able to transcode one stream without any issues? I see the same problem watching live TV on the Media Server itself through Plex but not on the Windows app from SiliconDust, so I don’t think it is anything to do with the Roku’s abilities.
BRBMan: I actually have two SiliconDust tuners installed and I left them with their default settings:
