I purchased a lifetime Plex Pass about a year ago, one of the major factors that influenced me was the livetv-dvr functionality.
A week or so ago I get an email telling me that the EPG that Plex uses will be shut off in June, and that I need to sign up for another provider, Plex is recommending IceTV (In Australia). I’ve looked into IceTV, and it seems good on the free 30 day trial, but is going to cost me $3.95 a month for something that I paid Plex to provide “for life”.
There is another provider that is free, Freepg. I’ve tried it and it’s not particularly good, not linking some channels to the guide correctly which prevents Plex from accessing them.
This raises several points:
I paid for a lifetime of a service that had certain capabilities, Plex has reduced the capabilities of the product after I paid based on those capabilities, pretty poor form.
The fact that I cannot even map a channel because of no guide is terrible - surely being able to access a channel without a guide is better than not being able to access it at all.
why not use the free information that is transmitted over the air by the tv station, sure it has less data than the XMLTV information, but that is better then nothing.
The free EPG in Australia will continue to be provided, and is not going away. Only a few countries will be losing the guide when Plex changes their metadata provider for the EPG in June 2019.
Losing coverage: Belize, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Indonesia, Japan, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates
That’s different to the email I received, excerpt below:
In June of this year, Plex will be making a change to its metadata provider for our Live TV EPG that impacts certain areas, including the country you selected when setting up your DVR. In order to continue to receive EPG data for your Live TV needs, you’ll need to make an adjustment to your Plex DVR setup to switch to using an XMLTV source of guide data.
i just rebuilt my plex server and now when setting up DVR New Zealand is not listed for tuning information. Has anyone struct this and did they find a fix? I have tried AU and UK but cant find channels any more. Server version Version 1.15.5.994.
They might be going with Rovi. Rovi purchased Tivo a while back and chose the Tivo name to continue operations and there have been talks recently between Tivo and Plex for greater integration. Whatever that means, your guess is as good as mine, at this point. Rovi’s guide service is NOT superior to Gracenote and we Tivo owners were pretty upset when it switched. It has gotten better and Tivo is working on some great things, like auto commercial removal on every recorded show,but time will tell.
“DVR Setup is missing New Zealand in the list of countries in ver 1.15.5.994”
As you will have to select a country before you can continue to the next page use Australia. On the next screen use the option “Have an XMLTV program guide on your server…”
Copy this link into the XMLTV GUIDE field provided: https://nzxmltv.github.io/xmltv/guide-v2.xml
For more information please read in the forum about the alternative EPG to use for New Zealand: Poor progam guide information in New Zealand
I have been using the alternative EPG for a number of months and it works brilliant.
I am using Plex TV & DVR in Czech Rep. Now reading that in June the EPG provider will be changed and support dropped. Does that mean I will be not able to watch TV through Plex at all? What are my chances now?
mr_robert this is a bigger issue than Plex seem to think.
I believe you will need to find a provider of EPG data in XMLTV format. I’m unsure of the availability of these in your area but here in Australia there is only 1 (paid) provider that is any good, a few free services are available but their data is pretty poor.
The fact that Plex cannot simply tune to a channel and stream it without EPG information is a big failing in my mind. Using 3rd party providers for EPG data is always going to have minor glitches, these leave gaps in the EPG. If we could still watch that channel at that time it would be little more than a minor annoyance but the way things are now is not good.
You’ll still be able to watch TV, but you’ll need to switch to an XMLTV guide (information here: Using XMLTV for guide data | Plex Support). I use an XMLTV guide myself, and it works really well!
Initially it was ‘only’ the epg support and you should be able to use third parties for it. But suddenly in its wisdom Plex now does not support setting up a DVR anymore.
So yes, you will not be able to watch TV through Plex (probably ever).
Mail from plex: in newer versions of Plex Media Server, we’ve prevented new users from creating a new DVR using affected countries, since the guide data won’t be available in the future.
(Unfortunately, I’m unable to provide that information at this time)
