So, many months after becoming a lifetime Plex member, and seeing that Plex seems to have no interest in making it’s live TV and EPG offering on Andriod TV a serviceable solution for customers, I feel I had no option but to migrate to Emby who have a much better live TV & EPG, in fact everything seems to be faster and more configurable in Emby.
Things like:
1.Plex EPG does not update itself after you drop out of watching a programme
2. Try to tune to a programme and it only gives you a record option, despite the prog being live
3. Scheduled recordings, work, fail, work, fail, work, work, fail
4. Easy to get lost in the EPG if you scroll too far, it all gets messy
5. Search icon in the EPG does nothing, nothing at all
Nothing has changed in EPG for many many months despite numerous Plex updates to the app. I’ve had enough now.
Very disappointed in Plex using the pretence of it being a ‘Cable cutting’ solution, yet offering such a poor and seemingly unsupported live TV EPG.
Over to Emby then for me.
I find this discussion in concept very interesting. Plex has attempted to position itself as that swiss army knife of media. A multimedia hub of the home so to speak. I just installed and started using plex. My thoughts include:
While the media auto recognition is quite good it is not perfect. What I found difficult is that if it categorizes media I correctly it was not as easy as it could be to correct and customize my media.
IPTV: with the influx of legitimate IPTV it would be 8n Plex’s best interest to be the go to for some of these services…instead it is almost like they want nothing to do with it.
3 . Ease of install… I just have to say…well done.
I’d like it if plugins were not buried in a subsection. Especially if the scope of this product is being intentionally limited. What i mean by this is it’d be great if a plugin could add itself as a quick link in the nav.
The only issue I have with Plex is the Live TV EPG, everything else is running great, if they would use something different to get the EPG for UK TV Channels, especially Freeview UK rather than using OnConnect via Gracenote?
We have a number of missing channels in the EPG that are being transmitted, most notably channel 99 Smithsonian TV was there one minute and 3 weeks on it’s disappeared into the ether!! another channel that came on air a couple of weeks ago Now 90’s on Channel 84, still hasn’t made it into the EPG, even with me putting a few requests in for this to be added.
My only issue is the OnConnect service, it sucks big time!! I wonder if @ChuckPa or @sa2000 can shed some light on this for us? Please we’re losing our minds, missing channels that we know that are there but we cannot watch them…
39 days later… Emby rocks, the EPG is excellent, programme sorting, configuration, info to hand, recording… superior.
Plex seemingly not giving a damn about their Live TV offering and not making any changes month after month, despite the gripes about it… made me switch… and boy i’m glad I did. So I can thank Plex for that at least.
I’m with you on how badly the live tv experience has sucked for our household. Recording very seldom works. I’ve had to resurrect our old Win MC to appease the wife. I tried repeatedly to get her to use Plex but she’s thrown up her hands. Shame. It’s the last piece of the puzzle for us.
“If you already own an NVIDIA SHIELD TV then you likely know why it has been called “the supercharged Ferrari” of Android TV devices by Android Central. Fine-tuning it with Plex makes it even better!”
Dear Plex Live TV user -
We wanted to let you know about a change to the Plex service that will affect how you use Live TV and the electronic program guide (EPG).
In June of this year, Plex will be making a change to its metadata provider for our Live TV EPG that impacts certain areas, including the country you selected when setting up your DVR. In order to continue to receive EPG data for your Live TV needs, you’ll need to make an adjustment to your Plex DVR setup to switch to using an XMLTV source of guide data.
Note that such XMLTV guide data would be provided by a third party (not provided by Plex), and is required in order for you to continue to enjoy Live TV on Plex.
A Plex support article [ here ] details how to seek out XMLTV listings for your country and how to enable them within Plex settings.
To be clear, this change will not be final until June and we’ll send one more email as we get closer to remind you of the change.
We are sorry for the inconvenience and hope you continue to enjoy all the cool benefits of Plex.
@RikkeSee Me? I’m so… Err… What’s the word? Ah, I enjoy helping where I can, but as I’ve said Gracenote Onconnect sucks big time, I’ll have to look into setting up xmltv on my Ubuntu server, in between hospital and other family issues…
I’m appalled that Plex are going to leave us high and dry with the EPG though, and making us get it ourselves, even when you have to pay to get live TV to record. I still stands by Plex being great for sharing my media with my users that I have, but the live TV section should’ve been carefully thought about before they released it into the open, especially where Gracenote is concerned!
It is effecting these countries; Belize, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Indonesia, Japan, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates
Unfortunately there was something amiss in the email filtering where some folks in the US and Canada at least got the email as well. (and we clearly should have added the list in the email)
@BigWheel Just a quick, possibly stupid question… Will we in the UK be seeing a change in the Freeview EPG some time soon? As I’ve commented before we have missing channels that are being transmitted on Freeview and I would like them added. I’ve posted multiple times on the online form, but sadly got absolutely nowhere fast, and it’s becoming a pain.
Would be great if the proper Freeview guide was made available, but if not I’ll have a stab at putting something like XMLTV or another EPG Grabber onto the server and redo the DVR to pick up all the channels that way?
The UK Freeview EPG data is even worse, you would lose series record features with this, and non of your shows would have a season/episode (some broadcasters put this in the description, but not in a usable field)
I dont find many differences between Plex & Emby for the EPG, they both use the same source, much better than the default OTA data
I’m using Emby on Nvidia Shield right now, have been now for months.
Recording of TV show is much better than Plex, no missed recordings. Posters accurate etc
EPG is much much better than Plex. Easier to use, , clearer, easy to scroll though, define your channels, even change the channel posters. Select which day / week you wish to view.
As I think on here somewhere… i’d never go back to Plex. Emby on shield is officially beta… and yet still far superior to Plex in my view.
I’d be very happy to use an XMLTV file on the Shield TV/Plex Server. Does anyone know how to do this? The methods for Windows, Mac and linux won’t work on Android (Shield).
I saw that in my Google news feed, it’s crazy still have missing channels etc on Live TV too… Would I be wishful thinking if I said they may be fixing the EPG guide on Android and nVidia Shield?? Ah, sorry that was a late April 1st!!!
Why push something before fixing it?
