Plex Media Player live TV seeking/time shifting BROKEN

Live TV & DVR
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Server Version#: 1.14.1.5488
Player Version#: 2.28.0.952-5408ca22 (Windows, February 20, 2019)

I’m trying out Plex and I’m pleased with its Live TV playback. However I’m experiencing a major bug with time shifting live TV.

The Plex Media Player buffers and plays back TV live in real time, no issues. However, if I want to seek to another time in the buffer, using either the skip 10/30/start/end buttons, or by selecting a specific time on the timeline, the player will appear to be playing from the time I want, but it will actually be streaming from a time hours ago in the playback buffer.

For example, it is 7:22PM ET at the time of this post. I was watching CNN. But I just selected a time on the timeline of 7:17PM. However, PMP shows the video playing back from 5:48PM ET (according to the CNN clock). If I click on the timeline again at 7:17PM, it will then begin playing at 7:17PM.

Unfortunately this is creating an extremely confusing experience while watching TV, because if I try to seek around commercials, or skip to a specific show, I’m jumping all over the place without knowing what or when in the buffer I’m actually watching.

I believe this happens only when you are watching TV that has been playing for at least one “program” of content (where the timeline starts over again on the left side). It does not seem to happen when I start watching a show, only after it changes to a new one. This is a very reproducible behavior, and happens almost every time the player is left inactive for more than 10 seconds.

EDIT: I can also add that it seems to randomly decide with each click/skip whether it wants to go back in time to a different program. I was just watching a show, and I was seeking to skip a commercial. Each time I would click there was about a 50% chance that it would throw me back to a program that aired two hours earlier! This issue is not only present on my desktop, but my laptop as well.

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No replies yet…

But here is a screenshot that is illustrating the problem very well:

You can see that the time I wanted to play back was 3:06PM, but the player skipped back to playing video from 2:06PM.

After a few minutes of letting the player play from 2:06PM, the timeline then gets all messed up and does not show neither the playback time of the video, nor the time I wanted to watch from originally. You can see in this screenshot the timeline stays stuck to the start of the buffer (2:03PM), even though the time of the video being played back is 2:13PM (and despite the fact I originally selected 3:06PM):

Here is a video of the issue as well:

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Is there any hope at all at getting a response from the Plex team? Or is this pretty much proof this feature is a dead project

See another bug report here of the same (or similar) issue, which also has no response: DVR scrubbing / fast-forward during recording jumps around

Even though I don’t expect a fix tomorrow, I at least would like to see some acknowledgement of the issue so that an effort will be made to fix it. Because as it stands now, Live TV is unusable. This is the only issue standing in the way of it being perfect for Live TV viewing and replacing WMC.

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Bumping this topic as I have these exact symptoms as well on my Apple TV 4K. Thanks to @jcap14 for documenting this issue. A response from the developers is warranted and would be appreciated by me as well.

Thanks!

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Still nothing from Plex… not even an acknowledgement that it’s broken. shrug

This is CORE functionality of a DVR that’s broken.

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1 month later and still no response.

Disgraceful of the Plex team.

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bumping, this is still broken.

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I have the same problem as well. Driving my wife crazy.

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THIS. Wife is begging me to go back to Windows 7 and Windows Media Center for this exact reason.

Where is Plex on this? Insane that a key/core bit of DVR functionality is broken, and they’re ignoring it.

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I’m having this problem too, and it is infuriating for live TV. When watched something fully recorded, the skip/repeat buttons work as expected.

Do we know if it’s a Windows PMP bug or something on the server? Has anyone tested this live on other clients?

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Anyone from Plex have anything to say about this??

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I have had this intermittently as well on multiple clients. Sometimes timeshift works well, other times it does not. It seems unbelievable that their testers wouldn’t see it.

It also seems unbelievable that they don’t have a known issues list that they post in these forums for each server/client. Each release they show fixes. It would be nice if they had known issues that you could at least see they acknowledge and are working on…at least major ones.

As always, post your logs would help more.

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I can report that time shifting is broken for me across multiple Plex media servers and on multiple media playback clients.

Plex media server running on a i7 16gb ram PC and also on a dual-core M MacBook. Media playback clients include Roku Ultra 4661, Roku Streaming Stick + 3810, Windows Plex media player, Mac OS Plex media player, iOS Plex media player, Android TV Plex media player.

Time shifting from either server on all above listed devices is WILDLY inconsistent on both live TV and DVR recordings in process.

As other users have mentioned, consistent and correct time shifting is a HUGE and CORE essential element of any live TV and DVR service in 2019.

This is a real let down as the Plex ability to flawlessly playback the full MPEG 2 OTA signal is otherwise wonderful.

Please fix this Plex.

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And yet still nothing.

Basic scrubbing functionality of any Live TV / DVR service that’s been around for over a decade… is bugged / broken. And not a single peep or response from Plex.

Atrocious.

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Plex’es DVR has not been around anywhere near a decade lol!

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I was referring to scrubbing being a Basic/Core function of DVR services in general for the past decade.

If Plex’s intent was to offer that service… and they’ve clearly included scrubbing functionality. They should be supporting it; As it is completely broken.

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Also broken for me. Seems to happen when recording for an hour or more. If recording a 2 hr show and watching 15 minutes behind live, once I get to the 1 hr mark I can’t use the timeshift anymore as it’ll just go to live and I can’t rewind anymore. I am a semi-noob when it comes to Plex but this seems to be a new (last month or so) issue for me.

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Bumping this as I have the same issues. For me time shifting seems to work most of the time if just jumping back or pausing for short periods, but ask it to do anything over 30 min and it will break.

Plex team??

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@ cire12
I see you reply almost a year ago this issue was being looked into, please advise??

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@pirate252 still hasn’t been fixed. Just like everything else that is broken.