I finally decided to finish cutting the cord and discovered that I’m able to get all my local channels through OTA. Then I discovered that my Vizio E50X doesn’t have a tuner. I knew I wanted the Plex DVR function so I finally went all in and got my Lifetime Plex Pass and ordered an HDHomeRun Connect Quadro. I’m running my Plex on a QNap TS-251 which is great as long as I don’t try to get into 4K transcoding. Setup was super easy and we got our first show DVR’d last night with no issues at all.
Now comes the problem. My current setup won’t stream live TV. I have a tuner in my Living Room TV so it’s not an issue, but the stupid Vizio in the bedroom and my other TV in the house both rely on Chromecast. I complained to SiliconDust of course because their app should cast to anything without even involving Plex but it doesn’t, and their answer is to send you to Plex’s specs for streaming (well played?).
So what am I going to have to do to get live TV in the rest of the house? Upgrade Plex hardware? Buy Fire Sticks? Get an nVidia Shield? Need some options from those of you who’ve already fought this battle!
TIA
From what I’ve been reading Roku and HDHomeRun don’t work together and only just now got a Beta client. So it would be an option to work with Plex but probably not my best option to go with.
Do you know why Plex isn’t streaming your HDHomerun because it should and your TS-251 should be OK to do it. …perhaps its worth trying to fix this first as you shouldn’t need to spend any money on this?
Yeah and it isn’t great IMO. I don’t know if it just my setup at home but I have a HDHomeRun Connect, a Roku Premiere+, and whenever I try to play live TV through their app it crashes to the home screen after a couple of minutes.
I have found playback through plex to be much more reliable. The Android app from HDHomeRun is solid though.
I bought the TS-251 because it will do transcoding up to a point. I found out it won’t transcode 4K when I downloaded my first few 4K movies. Plex won’t even attempt to stream it to the Vizio, it actually says it’s not supported as soon as I hit Play after connecting. I’m on the latest Plex version, the HDHomeRun is on latest firmware and so is my QNap. The whole system is runnin on Gigabit LAN. No Wifi involved other than my Samsung Galaxy phone running the app to choose the TV and send the cast, and that should be done in moments and not have anything further to do with the stream, so I don’t know why Plex on the TS-251 won’t stream it unless it’s a higher level of transcoding than the QNap can handle.
You could consider a cheap Fire TV 4K stick, which has the Android TV HDHomeRun app and direct plays MPEG2 (avoid the non-4K stick). If you can wait a while, it’ll probably be pretty cheap on Black Friday.
SiliconDust seems to be working with Roku to try to improve their app, but from everything I hear, that’s a challenge.
For these 2 TV’s what about a Fire Stick? I could pick up the new 4K stick for about $35, but will it cooperate with Plex, with my Android phones (betting that’s a no?)
There’s a lot of news that Amazon made SiliconDust shut down their streaming service and blocked the HDHR app from the Stick, but now that they’ve shut the service down can you get the app on the sticks again?
So the only drawback would be that you can’t “cast” from Android to it you have to mirror the screen. But it would be a $35 device with direct access to the HDHR and a usable Android App. That would solve the problem of just wanting to watch live TV. Plex isn’t an issue once something’s been DVR’d, that worked flawlessly last night with 10 minutes of setup and it even almost perfectly cut the commercials out.
Yep. It seems like the best option for you to test for a week or two, knowing you can return it to Amazon if it doesn’t work to your satisfaction.
BTW you can actually get an adapter that allows you to plug a Fire TV 4K into ethernet. Amazon has an official one, but you can also put together your own and get speeds above 100mbps if that’s needed for you. If you have fast wifi, it’s probably not needed.
Sorry that’s a misinformation on my part. Not remote devices. I haven’t even enabled external access to my Plex yet. I’ll test again and post the actual message I’m getting. Meanwhile I’m ordering a Fire Stick 4K to try out. That will pretty much solve my issue until I can do another big upgrade down the road with a better NAS or nVidia Shield that can do full 4K transcoding in the house.
One thing I have to mention as well, I don’t use the HDMI output from the TS-251. I stream to the Chromeast on the Vizio and the non - smart TV and I use the Plex app on my main TV which is a Samsung. I never liked the interface of the Qnap local media center
