Hi all! Just curious - Once Plex supports live TV on Apple TV, will it be possible to use direct play or will it always need to transcode? I’m getting ready to pick up an HDHomeRun Prime, but I’m wondering if my Plex server cpu (iMac) is going to be taxed with multiple simultaneous transcoding sessions when I have several Apple TVs and iOS devices streaming (on my home network) at the same time.
While I don’t exactly what Plex plans are I would assume that it will always have to be transcoded because most OTA streams are still MPEG2 streams which is not supported by the AppleTV. Currently the iOS version requires re-encoding as well.
As the usefulness goes up with Live TV and improved reliability, I am beginning to get concerned with cpu limitations on the number of streams. On the plus side, I just tested 3 HD streams simultaneously with no issues. 2 Rokus and 1 iPhone. Win7 on a core i5. Picture quality was good on all three. CPU utilization started at 90%, but then ramped down to 40%. Maybe it builds a buffer and then backs off.
