So I have the HDHomeRun tuner and Plex (mostly) records stuff properly. However, I’ve never been able to get it to record the afternoon and evening NFL game. In the Recording Schedule every week it properly displays all (typically) 4 games on Sunday. When recording starts at 12pm CST, everything continues to look normal. As soon as the first game recording is complete, the afternoon and evening game disappear from the Recording Schedule. They still appear in the Program Guide, and it still indicates that they’re scheduled to record, but they never do.
This doesn’t even get into the wholly useless way that Plex organizes NFL games - it seems to believe they’re episodes of some European soccer reality TV show.
Anyone have recording working properly that would like to share their settings so I can verify whether that’s the problem?
Interesting - I came here to the forums to ask about this same thing since I’ve been experiencing it as well. To be clear, this problem has been happening on both versions 1.9.6 and 1.9.7 PMS (can’t speak for any previous versions since I never used them). I my case I’m using a WinTV quadHD PCIe card for the tuner, but I don’t think that matters. I thought that maybe there was a “limit” to how many episodes of a single show will record in a day or something - but there’s nothing in the menus limiting that anywhere. I hope that a dev will take a look at this problem - I’m willing to provide logs or whatever you need to troubleshoot.
In my instance I’m running Plex Media Server on a WD My Cloud PR4100. We don’t watch the games live via Plex (since RasPlex doesn’t and likely won’t ever support Live TV) and instead simply switch the TV over to its in-built tuner.
Not quite the all-in-one solution we were looking for from Plex, but now that we’ve fully “cut the cord” (not counting Internet) it’s worth the small inconvenience.
The whole point of getting the antenna, tuner, and using Plex DVR was to eliminate the temptation to download shows from torrent sites.
I’m wondering if maybe the problem is that Plex doesn’t name NFL games properly? The first two games on Sunday start at the same time, so it starts recording both of those and names them “NFL Football (2017) - 2017-11-26 00 00 00 - team 1 at team 2.ts” So maybe when those games end and the next ones are up, the media server goes “nope, I’m good, I already got that one”? It seems pretty clear based on some previous behavior I’ve seen that Plex only really looks at the first part of the file name to match it up with something.
What would be fantastic would be if there were some way to submit help requests directly to Plex, instead of having everything point to a KB article or the forum…
I experienced the same issue multiple weekends when configuring Plex (1.8.x and 1.9.x) to record NFL Football as a series. The Recording Schedule looked fine at the beginning of the day, but the afternoon games were not recorded.
My workaround for the past month has been to configure it to record individual games rather than the series.
I know plex has and is looking into this as I have a ticket open specifically for this issue and I’m a huge NFL game recorder. I’ve got every game back through 2012 recorded and all the SuperBowls.
I think I get hit harder with this than most due to the history of games I have in my system. In testing 1.10.0 (released as BETA today to Plex Pass members) I noticed improvements in handling of NFL games which I “think” might work for most people but still gives me a bit of trouble. I had good luck with it on Thursday and Sunday as well as with several college games from Thursday to Saturday.
So could you guys give the latest Beta a try and report back how it works for you now?
Carlo
PS wasn’t it a great week for American Football? Still have tonight’s Monday Night game as well.
Thank you cayars. I just installed the latest beta 1.10.0.4516 today, but I’ll have to wait until Sunday when the NFL games happen. That said, I continue to have this problem every day that more than one game is scheduled to record (Thanksgiving day and yesterday). I’ve even done a “repair” on the PMS installation which didn’t help. I would post logs, but mine only go back to yesterday at 5pm which is after the NFL games disappear from the recording schedule.
it’s funny . . . I’ve not had this issue - I’m going to guess because I have it set to record All Pittsburgh Steeler events and SNF recorded fine for me last night
I’ll upgrade to the latest later today or tomorrow probably and verify that my Steelers are being recorded this weekend.
And yeah - I totally dislike how NFL and NHL games are organized . . .
Well you would only get one NFL game recorded per day with that type of setting correct?
The problem for most people has been recording multiple games each day/week.
PS Concerning game organization. I use something of a workaround myself for sports. I setup a Library of Type OTHER for my sports. So for example I have a library called NFL and it’s layout is this:
/NFL
/NFL/2012
/NFL/2012/Week 15
So sport (NFL), then Year, then week, followed by all games for that week.
I then use the FOLDER navigation for that library. IMHO it’s the best/easiest method to use clients against sporting events when you have a lot of them. If you only have a few recorded and delete them after watching the normal TV Show library probably isn’t that bad.
Okay, if you manually select every game and record it (instead of recording all the games) that solves the “not recording later games” problem.
However, Plex then sticks each game in its own “NFL Football” show/folder/whatever in the Library. Don’t try to merge them, it just stacks them all up as separate versions of the same episode.
This is what really makes me frustrated. This is Plex recording a show, naming a show, and being unable to read its own show names. It calls them “NFL Football (2017) - 2017-12-07 00 00 00 - Dallas Cowboys at New York Giants.ts”
I don’t pick that name, Plex does. And then Plex can’t tell that this is a different football game than “NFL Football (2017) - 2017-12-07 00 00 00 - Oakland Raiders at Kansas City Chiefs.ts”. And to make matters worse, there’s no effective naming method I could manually apply that will allow Plex to understand that those are different games.
Even MORE confusing is that if Plex records a game it will display the “Team 1 at Team 2” part of the name instead of the date or the even more laughably inappropriate “Episode 12-10”. But if you move that file around at all (say because you tried to merge all your single-game-“TV Shows” into one NFL Football thing and they got stacked up on each other instead, you go back to that date or episode display thing.
But hey, at least I’m able to record all the games now.
We generally delete them after we watch them, but it would be nice to keep some games over a longer time. It would especially be nice to be able to keep them in some kind of organized fashion without employing my IT skills. This whole “1 episode TV show per game” display is annoying.
Reason I asked is because what I found to work the easiest for Plex is create a new OTHER type for Plex. I manually move the files to this new directory structure. I also don’t care at all about saving the meta-info for sports programming as everything I need is in the date or library structure itself.
So for me it would look like this:
\Sports\NFL\2017\Week 15\game name.ext
I’ve got every NFL game back to the start of 2012 saved this way.
Under Sports I can have College Football, College Basketball, MLB, etc.
In each client I use Folder View to navigate this library which works great.
That seems reasonable, but again - we’re talking about moving files around. I’d like a “just works” solution. I’ve come to realize that doesn’t (yet) exist, but with any luck Plex might fix it before too much longer.
Here’s a question you undoubtedly have a decent answer to: what do you do to make the game files not ludicrously huge? The *.ts file format Plex natively records to is pretty stupid. It’s massive, and requires a lot of transcoding, which means that lightweight clients like the RasPlex flip directly out any time you try to jump ahead more than 30 seconds at a time.
If I decide to start saving many games in the long-term my current thinking would be to use the Optimization feature built in to Plex and then just “steal” those files away from Plex’s control since it doesn’t let you keep the optimized version when you delete the original unless you hide it from Plex first. (Still more back-end work than I’d like, but at least I can do that in batches.) I’ve got a 12TB array on my NAS that runs Plex Media Server so I’m not exactly hurting for space, but I really like looking at it and seeing a lot of free TB. It’s like wearing comfortable elastic waistband pants.
I trim the files cut commercials and half time shows (with few exceptions) and then I post process all recordings to H.264 in MP4 container while deinterlacing when needed. This makes the files stream far better as well as look great on any device since the files are deinterlaced. Not to mention the file size savings.
