My wife and I are trying to get away from our $90/month dish bill and she is VERY anti technology so it has been very hard to convince her to try all this out. that being said this is where my frustrations come in this morning I was trying to watch our local news live OTA and kept getting a “weak signal” error. the stream would pause for a few seconds and then resume. after doing this a couple times the session would “die” and the screen would return to the show screen where I could select “watch” again.
I am a lifetime plex pass subscriber and have a PMS setup on a dual Xeon 5130 server that reportedly passmarks at 2600. I am running an HDHomeRun Connect with a clearstream 4 antenna. (when using the signal strength app it shows good signal strength, SNR quality and Sym Quality) my “client” is a nvidia shield tv. All of the devices are connected to a gigabit switch with cat5e. cables.
Does anyone have any ideas on what could be the culprit? Am I asking to much of my outdated PMS hardware?
If you want to see logs. I will recreate the problem and upload them tonight when I get home.
If you just watching OTA why not just use the HDHomerun app on your shield? I need to make things easy for my wife also and this app is a lot easier for her than throwing plex in there plus it just always works.
@rljnc said:
If you just watching OTA why not just use the HDHomerun app on your shield? I need to make things easy for my wife also and this app is a lot easier for her than throwing plex in there plus it just always works.
I am going to try that this evening. I was hoping to do everything in one app. and the Roku that we are using in the bedroom doesn’t have an HDHomerun app to my knowledge.
You are correct the Roku does not have hdhomerun, and I understand the doing everything in one app, i to just want to use plex, but until a lot of the issues are ironed out, my wife would not be happy, so I currently use hdhomerun and their DVR currently. I know we are all trying to save money, you could get a cheap fire stick for your bedroom it runs the HDHOMERUN app and the interface of other apps looks similar to the shield, just a thought. Good luck.
I struggled with this same problem for quite some time. After a lot of research and trial and error testing I have the OTA remote TV feature running reliably on my Android phone. Even out in the woods with only 1 bar signal strength, I am now watching live TV with no stopping or buffering whatsoever!
The “Weak signal” is obviously not a weak antenna signal going to the HDHomeRun or it would not work so well when not on cellular data. I also have a signal meter and I am getting 100% strength from the antenna on all 33 channels in my area.
Ok, let me first share my hardware setup… I am using a HomeRun Extend as my capture device. I have the default Transcode profile on the HDHomerun set to “Heavy”. My antenna is an RCA Yagi model ANT751E. Plex is running on a Intel quad i7-2600 system. The CPU has the Sandy Bridge GPU. I have the Plex transcode to use the GPU.
Under Plex/Settings/Web/Quality I have the video quality set to 8mb/1080p. Under Plex/Transcoder/Quality I have it set to “Prefer Higher Speed”. Background default throttle buffer is 60 and Background Transcoding x264 present is set to “Ultra Fast”. Under Remote Access I have Internet Upload Speed set to 12mb (even though it never uses that much bandwidth).
Now, on the Plex Android app go to Settings/Quality. Turn “Automatically Adjust Quality” ON. Set "Limit Cellular Data to 2mb/720p. Set “Internet Streaming” to Maximum (very important) and Music Quality Internet Streaming to 96kbps. You might also consider setting “Home Streaming” to Recommended although it has nothing to do with remote access.
By setting the features in this manner I am allowing the Plex server to run pretty much wide open and then use the Android Plex app to throttle the stream based on cellular bandwidth. One of the main tricks is to set “Internet Streaming” to Maximum in the Android app (although this seems to contradict the other settings). It took a while to get this all right but now it works great and i am very happy with the outcome. I hope this helps anyone having this same problem. I have not tried this with another HDHomeRun model but I would think it would work just as well. Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Thanks!
I would like to add my own experiences of Live TV via HD Homerun with Plex Media Server running on Nvidia Shield. I had huge problems getting any live TV to play reliably on any client. It would start momentarily, then stop, start again, report weak signal, etc. This is all on a 16GB Shield with 64GB high-speed (150Mbps write speed) USB stick. The only way I got things to work was to format the stick as removable storage and then configure Plex Media Server to use this for the database and in turn everything it uses this for everything else such as transcoding. This is configured under Shield Settings > Storage.
To make Plex use it, start the Plex Client on the shield, go into Settings, scroll down to you Plex Media Server settings. Here you can stop and start the server but also specify which memory it should use - in my case it was listed as SanDisk - the name of the USB stick manufacturer. Formatting the USB stick as adopted storage, or adopted storage user accessible location did not work as anticipated, but as I’m not planning on installing any other large apps it doubt in my case it will make much difference.
On the clients I’ve not changed anything related to bandwidth, but for what it’s worth, web clients, iOS and Amazon Fire TV clients now all show live TV correctly. It took a lot of time to work all of this out. I would be interested if this helps anybody else.
