This weekend was my first long term use of LiveTV and sports (College Football) and it was not pleasant.
The picture is “choppy or not smooth” or as my wife puts it, like watching an old movie. I theorize it’s the amount of transcoding that has to be done in a live action stream. I also have YoutubeTV for streaming and it’s picture is far better. Needless to say, switching to the TV’s built in tuner is the best. My Roku Ultra and AppleTV are both the most recent models. My CPU is working but not100% and all the settings I know of are to provide the highest quality picture possible.
I can’t enable HW transcoding as Plex crashes (bug Plex introduced back around May which has been ignored).
I’ve tried this on both a 1080P 65" TV and a 70" 4K TV, both behaved the same. Two separate ROKU Ultras and one AppleTV were tried.
As it stands, Plex LiveTV for sports is not acceptable.
All of the networks carrying football between Saturday 9/1 and last night 9/2 which I believe were all 4 broadcast networks The logs I included were taken while watching a game to see of anything had improved so whatever station it was tuned to at the time of the logs.
I’m guessing your question is to find out if the original was broadcast in 720P or 1080i. It occurred on any/all games broadcasts (Fox[KDFW]/NBC[KXAS]/ABC[WFAA]/CBS[KTVT]).
Sounds like you want the smoothest playback for sports. Any transcoding will add a certain degree of image degradation. The less transcoding you have between the source and you, the better, right?
Since Plex already forces a certain amount of transcoding when viewing live, then you have an instance of transcoding an image that has already gone through a transcoding process.
If you do have an Extend, I do not know if this will actually fix your problem. But it cannot hurt and will eliminate one potential point of image degradation.
I was thinking maybe it was due to the method of deinterlacing that PMS uses for 1080i channels that was reducing the temporal resolution for you. However since it looks to be occurring for you on the 720p channels as well, that is probably not the culprit. I see you are using a Haswell based Intel CPU.
Unfortunately most of the PLEX client devices are H264 based so OTA (MPEG2) must be transcoded. It’s been discussed in numerous forums that the algorithms that PLEX uses produce inferior results.
Just throwing this out there, I find live football (and soccer for that matter) completely watchable on an AppleTV using the HDHomeRun EXTEND tuners which do hardware based encoding.
Please take no offense… “Watchable” is highly subjective. How does it compare to live TV via the native tuner on the TV?
Also, I’d hate to invest in yet another tuner. I’ve already got 2 quad tuners (about $180 invested) and even with HW transcoding enabled PLEX tells you the HW transcoding via the CPU can lead to even worse quality. I am not conflating that with the transcoding built into the HDHomeRun. I’m going to guess that’s an ASIC that does a better job.
There should be no reason why PLEX can’t perform a suitable transcode on a Haswell platform. It would be nice to know if they even care. PLEX has a lot of great ideas but I’m slowly finding out that the execution is typically not up to expectations.
For instance, why hasn’t recording control and grid guide shown up on the ROKU clients when they are the market leader in devices in use?
“Watchable” in the sense that I certainly don’t see the kind of viewing issues you’ve described (“choppy or not smooth”). I’m only viewing on a 49" (although 4K) TV, however, and at a reasonable viewing distance.
OTA with a TV tuner will always outshine (nearly) any other viewing mode since the TVs are built to display mpeg2.
Perhaps buying an EXTEND, trying it out and if it’s not suitable, return it? I believe Amazon has a 30-day return policy. Silicon Dust’s return policy isn’t half bad either: https://shop.silicondust.com/shop/terms-and-conditions/
I get that you want your present set-up to work and perhaps someone else will be able to assist more directly with that…
When my wife is the first to criticize the picture or the sound you can rest assured it is not “watchable” :)
Oh, I don’t return something I purchase unless it malfunctions or doesn’t perform as advertised. Just me. I saw some great return policies at Costco and Sams get destroyed because “some” were using it as an upgrade path in the earlier days of flat screens. Don’t get me wrong, I still think their policies rock but they used to be MUCH better on electronics.
I have one HDHomeRun Extend and one Hauppauge WinTV-QuadHD.
When comparing image quality in Plex of one vs. the other, I’d say the quadHD does have a nicer and sharper image. The quadHD also sends a lot more bits per second with numbers ranging from 10Mbps to 16 and 19 depending on the source. The Extend usually tops out at 8Mbps which is expected given that it is transcoding.
Having said all that, I can’t vouch for the quad’s image quality when viewing live sports as I don’t usually watch sports. The shows that I do watch, whether live or DVR’d, again the quad seems to have the better looking picture. But like you said, it is entirely subjective.
I suggest you remove one of the quads from your system and connect the remaining one directly to the antenna (no splitters, no cable extenders, just a straight shot from the antenna to the quad). You should also try moving it to a different PCIe port.
See if that makes any difference.
Also, you may want to try the quadHD on it’s own. Download and install the latest drivers from Hauppauge as well as the WinTV software; use it to watch something directly on your computer’s monitor. Does the picture look any better?
In essence, try to isolate what the source of the problem is. Is it truly Plex? Or is it something else?
That’s very odd, as I’ve been watching LiveTV sports for a while now and it has been working fine. My setup seems very similar to yours Smokingdog. I have a Windows server with an i5 processor, and one of those Hauppauge WinTV-QuadHD tuners. My clients are a Roku 3 and a couple of Nvidia Shield TVs. The Shield TVs, like other here have said, actually direct stream LiveTV perfectly, and just about anything else that gets thrown at them, so there are really never issues of quality with them thankfully. As far as the Roku goes, it doesn’t direct stream, but it seems to transcode at “original” quality, and it usually only uses maybe 10 - 15% CPU to do it. Picture looks really good too. Here’s what Tautulli shows when I watch LiveTV for NBC HD OTA in my area. I’m guessing the OTA bandwidth fir the main .1 channel is around 10Mb, with the rest taken up by the sub-channels…
Do you know if you record the game and then watch it back afterwards, does it do the same thing? Or is it only when watching it live? I assume this is connected to an OTA antenna? Or is it cable?
What sports are you watching? Find something where the entire frame is changing over a period of time like a pan of a long pass or other high action frames. You’ll see the degradation. I don’t know exactly how to describe it, maybe like a low frame rate. My wife describes it as watching an old 16mm film in high school. Believe me, if she complains it’s bad. It was so difficult to watch that we switched to the TV tuner. When I switched to my Youtube TV streaming account to watch a game on the BTN network, all was well.
I’ve got plenty of bandwidth, everything is connected via switched (non-blocking) Gb ethernet between the ROKU and the Server and the i7-4770 should have plenty of horse power, it’s doing nothing else at the time this is happening. I tried it on two different TVs with different ROKU Ultras (newest version). It’s definitely a Plex issue transcoding the MPEG2 to H.264.
OTA signal strength is solid, problem occurs on all broadcast networks. You need to look at full motion frames (high percent change) and you’ll see it plain as day.
I struggled with this for a while, and finally concluded that there is no ‘acceptable’ transcoding quality if you are watching the show on a sufficiently large TV. iPad or computer screen is fine, as I barely notice a difference with transcodes so its great for portability to various devices. However, on a TV you really want to be directplaying things.
My RokuTV can directplay mpeg2video if I select “Force” in the Plex App. Alternatively, people have reported good results with the NVidia shield.
I don’t use Plex for TV, but I would maybe look into some sort of refresh rate switching on either your device or your TV. Like maybe the football games are being broadcast in 29.97 fps, but your devices is set to 24p for movies. It’s probable that it’s all your TV content and it’s only really super noticeable with sports because of the fast pans, or because it’s 29.97 instead of 23.976.
