I use a Tivo Roamio Plus and two Tivo minis. I have been running Playon / MyMedia on my Roku 3 for streaming video and audio from my Windows 8.1 desktop and it really can play just about anything I can throw at it. I had never tried Plex before.
When I saw that Tivo released a Plex app, I decided to give it a try. Anything to decrease the use of a second remote and an HDMI input switch is a positive thing.
First impression was that it was a vastly BETTER UI than what I had with Playon. I know that Plex users in the Tivo forums have said that this UI is not as good as other Plex clients but it is much nicer than PlayOn. I usually don't install first releases of anything but I was pleasantly surprised.
The setup was simple and I have it running on my Tivo Roamio Plus and two minis. I also loaded the Plex app on my Galaxy S5 and it seems to work well either connected to my wireless network or over 3g/4g (as long as I don't start my VPN). If testing continues to be positive, it will keep me from having to buy two additional Roku boxes to run alongside my Tivo minis.
I am not quite sure how to determine how much video transcoding is going on compared to PlayOn but I expect more as PlayOn with the Roku 3 does support full 1080p and a lot of my videos are 1080p. All of the Plex / Tivo doc says 720p.
The issue I have is that my audio library is 95% flac. I understand that the flac codec is not supported by Tivo (I tried with USB). Is there any way to get Plex to transcode to 320 mp3 or do I have to make an mp3 copy of my library? Just a note, the flac files play fine on the Plex Android client.
The issue I have is that my audio library is 95% flac. I understand that the flac codec is not supported by Tivo (I tried with USB). Is there any way to get Plex to transcode to 320 mp3 or do I have to make an mp3 copy of my library? Just a note, the flac files play fine on the Plex Android client.
It is the expected behaviour that Plex server transcodes all Flac music to 320 mp3 for playback on the client (if the client doesn't support Flac).
If it doesn't do that, then this would be a bug and needs to be treated as such and reported accordingly.
Herein lies the rub: there is no publicly accessible support forum for this client. Only Plex Pass holders can access the Smart TV subforum at the moment.
The TiVo client is very new, I expect that the support forum issue will be solved sometime in the following days.
Well, if it's a bug, then I am happy as it will probably get fixed. All of my flac files are shown as "unsupported" on the Tivo client. MP3s that I have in my library work just fine on the Tivo client. The flac files and the MP3 files work great on the Android client on my Galaxy S5.
I was considering upgrading to the Flex Pass but was waiting until I got everything working on the basic service first. I have invested in services before that give me 90% of what I need but the missing 10% is pretty important.
I hope this get's addressed as I really do like the user experience when I compare it to PlayOn / MyMedia.
I used the new Tivo Plex app on a Roamio Plus and a Mini today, don't love the interface initially as I use PHT mostly, so am used to that interface.
Problem I'm seeing is buffering and pauses in 3.8mb/s 1080P content - is anyone seeing this, and is there a solution? I'm using a gigabit wired network for everything. Content is essentially unwatchable - buffers every 5 - 10 seconds of content and a pause length of about 3 - 5 seconds.
OK, my bad, I just read the online stories about the app, and see that it tops out at 720P. All my content is 1080, so when I set the app to 720P, I get similar pauses, this time from my server CPU during transcoding.... crossing my fingers for improvements to the Tivo app.
OK, my bad, I just read the online stories about the app, and see that it tops out at 720P. All my content is 1080, so when I set the app to 720P, I get similar pauses, this time from my server CPU during transcoding.... crossing my fingers for improvements to the Tivo app.
What type of CPU do you have on your server? Maybe it is not powerful enough to handle trancoding your original file. Can you also provide the xml output from the server for the file you are trying to play?
I use a very low power server because it works perfectly with all content with our Samsung TVs, Android devices and PHT, and uses little energy (about 12 watts). I could use a more powerful system, but love feeling like I'm being energy responsible on a system that's on 24/7. Up till now it's only been an issue with transcoding, and I seldom need to do that.
But I completely understand that some would find the system "under powered".
WEI - 3.8
AMD G-T56N CPU Dual core at 1.6GHz
8GB RAM / 64-bit Windows 7
P.S. I also have a quad core version at 2GHz sitting in a box, and may pull that out and try it just to see if it makes a noticeable difference.
The Samsung App and PHT can play a lot of files without needing them to be transcoded. The Tivo app is based on opera which means it is web based so it is very limited to what it can direct play. The Android app is better than this but not as good as the Samsung App and PHT.
Your cpu has a rating of [802](http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+G-T56N&id=268), which is very low. Unless your files are very low bitrate (<2 Mbps, maybe), it will have issues transcoding.
Is it rolling out regionally? I don't have it yet on my Roamio on the Westcoast. I see the announcement in Tivo Central, but it does not show up in the Music folder.
Similar issue here - all my content is 1080p and very high quality (8-12GB ave per movie) with DTS or Dolby sound. AppleTV with Plexconnect works fine, even Amazon FireTV with SMBC since Amazon native Plex seem to have a problem with the Dolby/DTS. I just installed the Tivo Roamio OTA and thought maybe this one box can do everything now. Video keep buffering every few second. I even tried to force transcode video on server to lower quality but it doesn't seem to help. I am using a Mac Mini with 2.3 Ghz i7 processor as a server.
Please let me know if anyone figured out a way to get smooth video from 1080p content, in the meantime I hope they improve the Plex app on Tivo since that would really be nice to have everything on one solution.
The Roku plex app has a setting you can change for each movie individually for quality settings all the way up to original (20mb 1080p). Hopefully they will implement this on tivo app.
What version are you running? The app should update along with all the other TV apps. Not sure how the Tivo works, maybe you need to manually do some sort of update.
@skisquash said:
This appears to still be an issue with TiVo in combination with Plex. Is there any solution yet?
What is the issue?
The issue I believe is that the TiVo mini and Roamio both max out at 720p from a Plex server. The hardware should be good enough to stream 1080p content but the software has imposed the 720p limit. My 1080p source content looks worse than 720p content due to the on the fly transcoding.
