I’m a daily user of Plex’s DVR functionality, have a HDHomerun Duo connected up and recording’s work great.
Live TV playback also works reliably (clients are Nvidia Shield, ATV, Samsung) but my biggest gripe, is it just takes far too long for playback to start.
I feel Plex should make Live TV auto-recoding configurable or start recording the session 5 / 10 seconds after Live TV playback has started, to hopefully decrease the playback start time.
To give you an idea of the Live TV experience I strive for…
Briefly, I enabled the ad-support Live TV on Plex and flick through a few channels.
As it’s just a live stream being consumed (i.e. no recoding) the experience is infinitely better - zero delays when channel hopping and you event get channel switching on the in-guide preview!
If they can deliver that experience on Live TV on Plex, why can they not allow the same experience on standard Live TV?
I presume it’s down to the recording element so if that is made optional, I’d like to think snappy channel switching, should you so wish to disable that part of the Live TV offering!
NB: I have listed Samsung as a client and frustrating that is by far the worse. There is no device / codec limitation, but Plex have just disabled Direct Play or Direct Stream for Live TV - everything forces a transcode which adds a further 5 second delay before playback starts.
Live TV from Plex is a stream. Live TV on your server is coming through a tuner. The speed depends on how fast/well your tuner can tune to the channel. Channels with a strong signal should tune faster than ones with a weak signal. The recording aspect add very little delay to this.
Thank you for the response!
When I use the Windows Store’s HDHomeRun application, when channel switching, both audio and video are displayed after roughly 1 second - no longer than 2 seconds.
When I use the Plex for Windows, Plex for Android (Nvidia Shield) or Plex Web, there is minimum a minimum delay of 4 seconds before both audio and video is displayed - usually around 5 seconds.
NB: I am testing Plex for Windows, Plex Web and HDHomeRun on the same laptop (11th Gen i7) and all playback is local.
If the recoding is not the overhead and responsible for the delay, I will close down this feature request.
Is there anything I can look for the in the Plex log files to help track down what’s causing the delay?
4 to 5 seconds is the normal delay for Plex to establish a live stream from a tuner.
Edit: I see this is a request to disable functionality on the Plex Server in order to speed up tuning/switching channels. If this was implemented tuner sharing would no longer operate.
@J_Strong One thing to note and that is the fact that Plex doesn’t have access to HDHomeRun’s programming and therefore Plex can only access a certain way, which may not be the most optimized way of doing it. Though it might be possible for Plex to contact them and see if they would licence the api, but I doubt Plex would pay the license to do so and they have not licensed other things such as H.265
HDHomeRun’s API is public and when checking Plex’s logs, that is how PMS integrates with it.
https://info.hdhomerun.com/info/http_api
To rule anything internal / propriety out of the equation…
I’ve tested by loading one of my HDHomeRun’s channel’s http URL’s into VLC.
As expected, the stream plays within 1-2 seconds.
