Hello,
I’ve been using the DVR and Live TV features with mixed success since the features went live in beta. Today, I read a Lifehacker article which plugged Plex very briefly as a potential OTA DVR solution. As they didn’t cover any pros and cons of Plex’s handling of these functions, I made a lengthy comment there detailing my experiences for the benefit of other Lifehacker readers, and to correct a statement made in the article that Plex DVR records directly to the cloud (which, as I understand, it does not). Another commenter suggested that I share those insights here, that any issues I’ve seen which might not be known to Plex devs could thereby be brought to those devs’ attention.
That commented is pasted below. Please forgive the fact that this is written as to be read by someone wholly unfamiliar with Plex DVR / Live TV, but I don’t have the time to re-write the entire post. Much of it will be issues which have already been identified, some even officially called out in the initial beta announcement on the blog (e.g. lack of grid-based EPG for granular browsing).
Comment pasted from Lifehacker:
Umm, Plex doesn’t save recordings directly to the cloud. Don’t get me wrong, I love Plex, but the live TV and recording stuff is still very beta. Presently, if you have a supported tuner, you can record shows, but you have to configure recordings via the server interface (accessed through a web browser). A week ago, you could only watch live content without recording first via an Android or iOS device. They just added support for viewing live TV via the browser a couple of days ago. If you’re using Roku, Fire TV, or any of the myriad other apps available from Plex, you’ll have to wait for support (they are working on it, though).
The experience isn’t very polished, yet, and has some significant drawbacks in its current iteration. You can’t view the programming guide in a traditional grid; instead you get a list of what’s on now, what’s coming on soon, and then suggestions for upcoming movies are shows based on your current library and recordings you’ve already scheduled. So if, say, your favorite football team’s game is airing on CBS next Saturday, you’ll have wait until the day of the game the first time, and then an hour or two before it starts, flip through the upcoming broadcasts to find the game and schedule the recording. You’ll have to make sure you choose the option to record all games for that team (if you want that), because it’s impossible to change the option later. After you’ve done this once, Plex figures out that you like “sports” and will create a recommendation list of all the upcoming sports airings, which helps with scheduling future recordings more in advance.
The trouble, though, is that it never shows you explicitly which channel the recording is coming from. For me, I get some channels perfectly, but a few have too weak a signal to be worth recording from. I’ve removed them from my channel list, but they come back, and it’s such a pain to do that I don’t bother repeating the process. Since the actual live feed is hard to get to, it’s not simple to check the channel before recording. And again, that’s only if I bothered to check which channel it was airing on when I set up the recording—you can see it if you go to Advanced options when creating the recording schedule, then click the option to record airings on any channel, which will show you a list of channels the show airs on (usually just one). But if you don’t do that when you create the recording, good luck figuring it out.
Oh, and back to my first point: It does not store recordings directly to the cloud. You can set up cloud sync to copy shows over to the cloud, but you’ll need a supported service such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive, and probably need to get a paid plan to have enough storage to be of any use. Since OTA broadcasts are encoded in the older MPEG2 format, the file sizes are huge. Plex claims to be able to transcode as it records, storing a smaller files, but my attempts to use this have resulted in unplayable files. And I’m using a beefy gaming rig with plenty of raw power for the transcode. I wouldn’t even attempt it on something with an Atom or ARM chip, which is what many people run their Plex servers from.
