With yet another price hike for AT&T TV Now (or whatever they call it these days), it’s time to cancel and go back to antenna. My current idea is to hook up a HDHomeRun in the upstairs closet and connect to the rest of the house using Powerline av2000. The current setup is
Plex server i7-6700 windows 10 with 48 Gb of memory and 5 TB disk.
HDHomerun of some kind connected through powerline av2000.
Clients will be:
Roku Steaming Stick on each TV connected using 802.11ac (mostly)
Vizio D50-E1 Smart TV with Plex
Amazon Fire tablets
Android Pixel 3aXL phone
Iphone 6S phone.
However, I am new to using Plex (though I have play with Kodi in the past), so I have a few questions:
Should I get the HDHomeRun Extend. Is the DVR going to expend a lot of CPU.transcending it.
What format is the DVR storing the recording? Mpeg2? H264?
For watching the TV live and also recording, is there an issue with interlace broadcast video?
Instead of HDHOmeRun Extend, couldn’t Plex use Intel Quick Sync or the GPU to transcode?
How difficult is it to move a Plex server? For example, I may want to move the storage to a NAS and may be use a different server.
The DVR process itself takes almost no CPU, it’s a straight recording from the mpeg2 transport stream with no compression. You CAN tell it to transcode, or you can transcode after the fact using something like MCEBuddy
There’s been no issues here, I have an HDHomeRun Connect Duo, mostly the server transcodes when watching live (Which I almost never do), or if watching the .ts files, so I use mcebuddy to transcode to a better container/codec with more control than the Plex transcoder offers.
Yes, it can use both of those to transcode.
It’s not terribly difficult, there are guides on how to move the database from one machine to antoher. However, moving your media content from one drive letter and folder structure to another will definitely cause you to have to re-scan and re-acquire metadata. So it’s best if you try and stay on the same drive paths even when moving servers…
Thanks for the reply. I converted a 480p MP4 to a Mpeg2 in a TS container, which I think simulate the Plex DVR encoding using VLC. The resulting MPEG2 played properly in Roku. Roku now has the ability to play Mpeg2 and appears to play SD Mpeg2 without issues. I tried to run it as Mpeg2 to H264 and Mpeg2 direct. In both cases, the effect on cpu was non-existent except for when the file is first ran. When the file is first run, we get 100% cpu for a few second until it dropped back to 2%.
There was a lot of artifact but that appears to be caused by the conversion by VLC.
I converted a 1080p MP4 to Mpeg2 again in a TS container. It appears that there was virtually no difference between transcoding the mpeg2 and playing Mpeg2 directly on the Roku. Based on this, I would say that the extend is not needed at least for the setup I am using.
