I’m trying to dump the dreaded EyeTV, so I have an HDHomeRun Connect Duo and got a Plex Pass, and once I configured Plex to deinterlace the picture looked good (though my old Mac Mini struggles a little).
The problem is that with EyeTV we’re used to be able to say “woha, what did that guy just say?” and skip back 10 seconds. Or pause for a break and then skip forward in little jumps. Or click on the timeline to jump back to anywhere in the buffered live video (either before or after the current play position). It has always done that really well, fast and responsive, admittedly not with de-interlaced 1080 HD (one of the reasons I want to dump it).
On the Plex client it looks like the intention is there to have similar functionality, but it just doesn’t work. Click to “step back 10 seconds” will usually work the first time, but the second time you click it it goes back to the time you started streaming. Or it will play video from later in the stream, instead of earlier. It seems to jump around randomly, regardless of what you try to tell it to do. The position of the white blob in the timeline bar doesn’t seem to be connected to which part of the buffered video will be play.
The timeline bar changes its mind about what video has been buffered. If you click on a point in the bar, the white dot indicating the current play position jumps to a seemingly random place, rather than where you clicked. The orange bar of available buffered video changes its length and position as you click, instead of reflecting the simple fact that some period of video has been buffered and can be stepped back to. If I hover with the pointer over a part of the bar that seems to be empty, sometimes this makes more orange bar magically appear and become available. The meaning of the orange bar is mysterious.
Sometimes if I wait several minutes, it settles back down to showing an orange bar that covers the whole period of time I’ve been watching the channel. But until that happens, I can’t catch up with the live video stream.
Do other people experience this, even on up-to-date hardware? My Mac Mini is quite old - 2011 model, and the apparent random behaviour could just be long delays while it tries to catch up with what I’m asking it to do.
(By the way, subtitles would be cool too - this is UK DVB freeview, and there is an option for ENGLISH (DVB_SUBTITLE) but none are displayed.)
