I have just received an email talking about the new video player for Apple TV that allows for Live TV without the need for transcoding, this sounds like a great step forward, but unfortunaly I don’t have Apple TV’s connected to all of my TV’s mainly because of the cost
I have just switch from Roku 4K Stick +’s to Fire TV Sticks because there is an app called Channels that allows this very feature as my wife was sick of trying to reliably watch live TV through plex and failing with constant issues and crashes
This new player sounds like the perfect solution, is it likely to come to the Fire Stick 4K soon? This would avoid the need to keep coming out of the Plex ecosystem and going into another app
I’m not sure you understand the question?
This is what was sent out recently by Plex:
“A few months back we introduced a new high-quality video player to our iOS and Apple TV apps for Plex Pass users as a preview; this enhanced player now supports playing and streaming live TV without any transcoding.”
@Daddy_Mummy is asking if an mpv-based player will be developed for other platforms as well…
Thanks @darcilicious this was exactly what I was asking, using the mpv-based player I am guessing his would give us the almost instant channel switching and reliability that is experienced on other apps
@DaveBinM I understand players would need to be developed for each platform individually but was really just asking if there was an intention to do this or if this feature would always be kept for just apple
For some platforms, they don’t allow custom players, so we’re unable to use mpv or any other player (other than the native one) on those platforms. We already use mpv for Plex Media Player, and the only other platform we’d potentially be able to look at is Android, however mpv on Android doesn’t have audio passthrough, which would be a regression from our current ExoPlayer2 player on Android (both of which are based on libva anyway). So in summary, not at the moment
Thanks for the reply your summary says what I needed to hear really as far as development on the Fire Stick 4k goes for the foreseeable future at least live TV will remain functionally the same.
As a user to be able to use Live TV more like a conventional tuner and get the wife approval you can either use Plex teamed up with Apple TV or Android / Fire TV based sticks with a 3rd party app such as channels. Its a bit of a shame as I would love to use Plex for Live TV but it just doesn’t function anywhere near as well as channels.
I would switch to Apple TV boxes if they were not so expensive, its fine for a single device but when you start putting 5 or so around the home it soon mounts up!
That’s not what I said. While mpv isn’t coming to the Fire Stick, it does use ExoPlayer (ExoPlayer and mpv both use libva), and there is always work going on to improve the playback experience.
I don’t doubt you are working to improve the playback experience but have you honestly tried switching you entire homes OTA experience to Live TV through plex?
I can assure you as some who goes to work 5 days a week and leaves my wife and children at home with no technical support there is a lot of work required to “improve the playback experience” it simply is not good enough.
If that is not what you meant or said I would strongly suggest trying to use live tv through plex on either roku or an android based device via the type of server the average person can afford to run at home for yourself and family I can assure you you’ll soon begin to wish there was more work going on to improve the playback experience.
Whatever channels are doing to make the live tv experience so stable and quick works as we have not had a single glitch or annoyance to my wife and family since switching it simply works as it should. I just wish plex would do the same
I’ve been using Plex on a NVIDIA Shield as the only way I watch Live TV and record it for the past 12 months, and I use an Intel NUC as my server. We’re well aware it’s not perfect, and are actively working to improve the experience.
Good I honestly hope you manage to improve the experience to a level that is acceptable as I have been a plex supporter for a long time and I recommended to the product to hundreds of people but the current live tv experience is very frustrating, I kept assuring my wife to stick with it, the next update will sort the issues but t just never happened if anything it has become worse.
The day live tv works as well as the competition will mean we would essentially never leave the plex app for all of our viewing, I just hope its not too far in the future
