I’m a new Plex Pass member/LiveTV/HomeRun/Firestick 2 owner. I decided to go all in with Plex and drop DirecTV. However, I’ve spent the better part of the past week trying to figure out why streaming Live TV on my Firestick 2 is so sporadic.
The issue is that at least for some channels TV will play for 15 seconds, pause, 15 seconds, pause, and repeat. Some other channels it appears to work OK, but there are noticeable horizontal lines across the screen. When I drop the quality way low and force Plex to transcode, the video stuttering goes away and all is fine.
I’ve eliminated my server, wifi, & homerun from the equation. Live video works perfect on my phone & on the web. My most plausible guess at what is going on is:
Different channels are being delivered in different formats from my cable provider
I’ve read in at least one post that if the format is not natively supported by the Firestick, performance is severely impacted because of the hardware needs. (at least one of the delivered formats must fit this category)
Unless someone knows a way otherwise, Plex will not transcode the video (direct stream) unless I drop the quality to 480p… so there’s no way to use my Plex server to convert live video to a format more pleasant for the Firestick
Is there truth to this scenario? If so:
Will a FireTV box work better cause it has 2GB of RAM and probably more horsepower? (New model is out end of Oct)
What about Apple TV?
I’ve read that downgrading the app on the Firestick helped some people, could that help (possibly it used to transcode)?
If there are issues native to the Firestick, that would be great to know for people banging their heads trying to get it to work. All I want is something I can plug into my TVs to deliver live TV but I don’t want to drop more bank on other devices if its not the Firestick.
I tried on my Firestick 1 as well, it “works” with a little noticeable gitter every 15s (nothing like the complete stop on a Firestick 2). Turning on “Display information overlay”, I can see that the Firestick 1 is actually transcoding live TV “Transcode Reason: Unable to Direct Play as MPEG2VIDEO is not supported on this device”. So my theory still holds, if there was a way to force transcoding live TV on the Firestick 2, it would work too.
Researching on here, I’ve only seen reports of issues with the Firestick 2 and LiveTV. Can anyone report that they have a Firestick 2 that works with Live TV without issues?
So is this just an issue with the Fire TV / Firestick? It would be great to know which devices Live TV actually works on before spending money on another client (Fire TV/Firestick should be considered not compatible with Live TV!). I can stream fine on my iPhone, does that mean a pricey Apple TV will work too?
My Gen 1 FireTV Box won’t play live tv. It crashes the plex program every time I tried. My Fire Stick 2 will sometimes play but the picture quality is horrible. I’m hoping the Gen 3 FireTV Box will have a better luck. I ordered 3 of them to replace my older devices.
For anyone interested, an update in my quest to find any device that will play live TV through Plex:
Firestick1: laggy, picture skips, unwatchable
Firestick2: pauses every 15s on some channels, picture degraded on “working” channels.
Mi Box: This thing is great so far, I’ve watched several hours of TV on it so has my wife. As a bonus, you can install Kodi directly from the Play store AND there’s a HDHomerun app too, so should Plex cause problems, you can cut out the middle man and stream directly from the HDHomerun!
Roku 3 w/preview app: Also seems to work fine with LiveTV, though the interface is roku-like and not super easy to find what you want to watch. Not bad for a 4 year old device.
Highly satisfied with the Mi Box, the AndroidTV interface isn’t laggy/non-responsive like the Firesticks are, gives AndroidTV an Apple-quality interface with none of the sluggishness FireOS devices have. Makes it feel like it’s 2017 and technology exists to stream video within your home.
I purchased two gen 2 Firesticks last Sunday just for Live TV / DVR use. They look and work awesome with my QNAP TS-251+ NAS using software transcoding.
