Live TV viewing works about 10% of the time

Live TV & DVR
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Server Version#: Windows 1.19.1.2645
Player Version#: Plex Web 4.31.1
Tuner Make/Model: HDHomeRun Dual (HDHR3-US)
Guide/Lineup name: Broadcast TV San Diego-LA OTA Broadcast
Using XMLTV?: No
Channel number/Name: All

I’m having a really difficult time viewing live TV lately within Plex Web. I’ll click a channel in the guide, Plex will start spinning…and spinning. For about four minutes. It’ll finally abort with the message “Playback Error - This live TV session has ended.” No video will have ever played.

I’ve found that if I just am patient and do this a few times in a row, eventually the live video will start streaming flawlessly. But this is rare, and only happens maybe 10% of the time. The other 90% it’s just spinning and I get the error message.

All of the devices in the network are wired. The station I’m trying to tune is a strong one with full bars, although this problem affects all channels equally.

If I go outside of Plex and just use the HDHomeRun app, I’m able to tune various channels quickly without any errors. It’s only when I try to view live TV with Plex Web that I run into problems. I’ve attached today’s Plex Tuner Service log…I hope that’s helpful.

plex-tuner-log.txt (123.2 KB)

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You don’t mention your server specifications, but it may be having problems transcoding. OTA TV is generally broadcast in MPEG2 and would need to be transcoded to be played by (most?) browsers. Do you see the same issue if you use either the Plex desktop app or Plex Media Player?

1 Like
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Hmm there may be something to that. Haven’t tried the desktop app or media player, however when I stream live TV to my Roku or Android phone (both showing Direct Stream) it seems to work 100% of the time.

My Plex server is running Windows 10, it’s an i7-3770 3.4Ghz w/16gb of RAM. There’s nothing else running on it. Like I said, once that transcoded stream starts going in my browser, there’s no problem. It’s getting it to start in the first place that’s the issue.

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I wouldn’t expect that CPU to have issues transcoding MPEG2 to H.264; I’m using an i7-3615QM and it it handles playing live TV via a browser fine.

If you’re interested though, there is an appimage version of PMP maintained by another forum-goer here, if you’d like to test:

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Hey nice, thanks for that link. PMP for Linux works great. Live TV Direct Play streams start right up.

Now if I could just get this working in a browser, all would be right with the world.

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I just updated the ATI Radeon drivers on my Plex server hoping that would do the trick, but nope. Still broken.

This happens whether I’ve got hardware encoding enabled or disabled. Seems to make no difference. Transcoded live TV just can’t be started reliably in any of my browsers.

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Can anyone help with this? Anyone at all?

I’d really like to be able to stream video to my browser consistently.

Is it because I’m using an older HDHomeRun (Dual) and Plex can’t handle it maybe? Have the APIs changed much on newer hardware?

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At this point it might be helpful to have some logs showing one of these failed attempts. Please make sure Debug logging is enabled and Verbose is disabled. These can be configured under Settings -> General (Show Advanced). The logs can be downloaded as described here:

It may have something to do with the tuner hardware, but it seems unlikely if viewing works reliably with Plex Media Player on the same system.

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This seems like the same issue im having

see: Live TV doesnt work in Windows Plex App but does in Firefox

I have this issue on 2 different PC’s 1 being the server, where live tv just doesn’t work on either the Plex Media Player or Plex App

And live TV runs fine on web browsers and android

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Yeah…I included debug logs in the first post.

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That’s just the tuner service log. Since it appears to it may be related to transcoding, we’d need to see the Plex Media Server.log file for a failed session. It’d probably be best to just provide the whole log zip file though.

And I can’t promise that I’ll be able to do anything with it, but there may be others who can.

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Plex Media Server Logs_2020-04-21_07-12-12.zip (1.7 MB)

Can you please take a look at my log as well, I think its the same issue

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Yours appears to be failing because the stream can neither be direct played nor transcoded, ostensibly due to an inability to encode VOBSUB subtitles.

Apr 21, 2020 07:11:59.428 [5528] ERROR - Streaming Resource: Cannot make a decision because either the file is unplayable or the client provided bad data
Apr 21, 2020 07:11:59.429 [5528] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Reached Decision id=22428 codes=(General=2000,Neither direct play nor conversion is available. Direct Play=3000,App cannot direct play this item. Direct play is disabled. Transcode=4007,Cannot convert this item. Implementation for subtitle encoder 'vobsub' not found.) media=(id=23936 part=(id=24063 decision=none container=mkv protocol=http streams=(Video=(id=71782 decision=copy width=704 height=576) Audio=(id=71784 decision=copy channels=2 rate=48000) Subtitle=(id=71785 decision=transcode bitrate=2147483647 encoder= languageCode=eng location=embedded))))

Why this is, I cannot say.

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Thanks, Your correct disabling subs fixes live tv

Unfortunately that gives me the issue of having to enable subs myself in anime but at least we got to the reason why,

1 Like
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No problem, glad it helped.

You may want to update your thread too, in case someone else stumbles across it with the same issue.

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Okay, here’s the full zip of my logs. Plex Media Server Logs_2020-04-24_09-07-55.zip (6.6 MB)

Here’s what I did immediately before I grabbed these logs:

Attempt to stream channel 5.1. Watch the spinner for a few minutes. Error message.
Attempt to stream channel 5.1. Watch the spinner for a few minutes. Error message.
Attempt to stream channel 5.1. Stream starts. Flawless playback.
Attempt to stream channel 5.1. Stream starts. Flawless playback.
Attempt to stream channel 7.1. Watch the spinner for a few minutes. Error message.
Attempt to stream channel 7.1. Watch the spinner for a few minutes. Error message.
Attempt to stream channel 7.1. Watch the spinner for a few minutes. Error message.
Attempt to stream channel 7.1. Watch the spinner for a few minutes. Error message.

And again, the error message was always “Playback Error - This live TV session has ended.”

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The biggest difference I see between the successful and failed attempts is that the client is reporting its progress in the ones which succeed:

Apr 24, 2020 08:45:06.489 [27552] DEBUG - Client [17bvvfefztvk0kkvfrxrmukc] reporting timeline state playing, progress of 0/0ms for guid=, playbackTime=0ms ratingKey=247101 url=, key=/livetv/sessions/eb2313ff-7c6b-44e5-b2a4-31cf0aecb6bf, containerKey=, metadataId=247101, source=
Apr 24, 2020 08:45:07.709 [18392] DEBUG - Client [17bvvfefztvk0kkvfrxrmukc] reporting timeline state buffering, progress of 0/0ms for guid=, playbackTime=1001ms ratingKey=247101 url=, key=/livetv/sessions/eb2313ff-7c6b-44e5-b2a4-31cf0aecb6bf, containerKey=, metadataId=247101, source=

There are no such entries for the failed cases (but there are for both successful ones). So it appears that the server ends the session after ~4 minutes of receiving no progress reports from the client (or were terminated by you).

It would seem either the client isn’t sending those reports or they’re not making it to the server for some reason. So:

  1. Do you see any difference in behavior regarding the location of the client, either running on the server locally or on a different system on the same local network?
  2. Do you see any different in behavior between accessing the client via https://app.plex.tv versus https://ipofserver:32400/web?
  3. Have you tried different browsers?
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  1. It doesn’t seem to make a difference if I’m using my wireless Ubuntu laptop or viewing directly on the Windows machine that runs Plex Media Server. The chances are low that the stream will start.
  2. No difference at all on a variety of machines. Failure rate seems to be about the same across machines and browsers
  3. I’ve tried Firefox and Chrome. One doesn’t seem to be any better than the other.
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Plex Media Server Logs_2020-04-30_12-19-40.zip (2.3 MB) LiveTV failing to find Tuner that has been working fine for weeks

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I’m starting to feel like I’m the only one with this issue, which means I have no idea how to fix it. :slight_smile: I’ll take any help from anyone, folks :slight_smile: