Server Version#: 1.14.1.5487
I run PMS on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ attached to a WD elements hard drive - which honestly runs perfectly and have no issues! It essentially just direct plays movies to various Apple TV’s throughout the house. Wanted to take it a step further and hoping you can help with a few questions with regards to the TV side of things…
I have recently purchase a Pi TV Hat and scanned for channels on Plex - (yes, I know that this is not officially supported by Plex). It seems to stream in MPEG2 and Plex converts it to h.264 which makes it impossible to watch live on a browser or ATV etc. I am located the in the UK which I believe we use DVB-T2 and signals are received in MPEG2 format?
The questions I have are and please don’t tell me RasPi is not powerful enough - I am confident there is solution, its worked perfectly so far
First I’d like to address the transcoding. Is there anything I can do to get Plex (through ATV) to play the format natively? Transcoding kills my CPU - someone mentioned installing a MPEG2 licence?
If not, is it better to install the TV Hat on another RasPi? Maybe that will help with the transcoding and maybe use Tvheadend / Proxy to beam it on the network. So essentially, it would be my main Plex Pi and another with the TV hat attached.
Plex does to pick up DVB-T2 HD channels - yes it works with the likes of HDHomeRun but anything can do to make it work with the TVHAT? Shall I install the TVHeadend service?
I have tried a couple of things, I had a tvhead server running Libreelec on a nuc, then tried a plex plugin but didn’t have much luck with playback.
Plex plugins are coming to an end.
You can install Libreelec server/backend & client to the Pi. don’t use plex for TV.
Or, install the server on one Pi, & run the client on the other Pi, using Rasplex?
I have a similar setup as you do - I’ve got my Raspberry Pi 3 B+ acting as a dedicated Plex Media Server. This has a folders mounted with NFS to directories on my Synology NAS. All is working well, and so I also invested in a Pi TV Hat and used Plex’s own Live TV and DVR setup to add the device as an available tuner.
So far it is working OK, however I primarily use it for recording as opposed to watching live TV. I have found that turning off transcoding at the time of recording made playback sluggish, so I have turned that back on. The downside of this of course being that there is a delay between the end of recording and it being added to the library, but that’s not a major issue to loose sleep over!
My experience of watching live TV has been ok the few times I have done it. That said, I’ve only watched live TV when I know nothing else is being processed (i.e. streaming to other devices or recording any TV), therefore I may have been lucky.
One thing I will say is I note that the playback experience varies on difference devices - the FireTV stick seems to be very good, with hardly any latency, and minimal buffering delays, whereas playing through the LG TV (Netcast OS) Plex app is slow to load. I only assume that the difference devices support different h.264 levels, etc. hence the different transcoding requirements.
Regarding the use of a TV Hat on another Pi, etc. I’ve just ordered a second TV HAT which I will be trying to either stack on the existing one (i.e. two on one Pi) and see if the SPI capability works with this HAT, or putting it onto a second Pi and using a proxy. I’ll let you know how I get on!
Just a quick update as I did promise in my last post - unfortunately the TV Hat for the Pi does not stack. Thankfully I have couple of other Pis doing different things, so I now have two TV Hats on two different Pis. All has been running smoothly for a few weeks.
As the TV Hats are now on different Pis to the PMS, I’ve opted for TvHeadend and tvhProxy using the link below for setup instructions instead of having the TV Hat accessed directly from PMS.
One change I have made is to stop using the Pi 3 B+ as a PMS as it was really struggling with streaming, recording AND transcoding. I’m going to revive an old PC with some new components and ubunutu to run the PMS, but all TV tuners will remain on the Pis.
