On Feb 28 Silicon Dust experienced an outage with their Premium Channels. Here’s the email I got:
“Premium TV channels are experiencing an outage due to a major outage at our upstream provider. They are working to restore service and expect to have it back this afternoon. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Silicondust Support”
After they restored service the Premium Channels will not play live or playback from recordings in Plex on the nVidia Shield. There is no sound, and jumpy video.
Live TV works fine on the HD app on the Shield. The DVR recordings play fine on VLC on the Shield. And everything appears to work fine in Plex Media Player on the PC and on the Roku. The problem only appears on the Shield in Plex and only on recordings after the Feb 28 outage.
Is Plex working on solving this problem? I am still having issues with the premium channels and plex. It’s been a week now and I haven’t heard if this is actively being fixed. Any feedback would be appreciated.
Here’s the latest from Silicon Dust:
Our upstream video provider seems to have changed some encoding settings, and this is causing issues when playing back or recording with Plex. We are attempting to get this changed with our video provider, and also have contacted Plex to see if they can do anything as well.
The problem is clearly related to a change in the programming source by SD’s provider. I would not suggest going through removing and re-adding the DVR to your server, it would be a lot of work and unlikely would make any difference. Let’s see what SD can do working with the Plex people!
Upon more investigation I have noticed that the video quality (and associated file size at about 1/3 as large OTA recordings) is much worse on Premium Channels since the Feb 28 change. I reported this as well to SD.
Its not really a Plex issue. There is a lot going on with Omniverse, who provides SD with those channels. They are currently being sued. They provide the same channels to other OTT providers as well.
Yes, most (if not all) of SD / HDHomeRun Premium TV service customers are aware of the law suit. The suit may or may not be the cause of OV’s shenanigans with the technical changes in the streams.
Can we keep the topic to the technical issue please?
So it’s the splendid people at Plex at CEDIA told me that the Shield TV is by far the best Plex end point. So of course I went with it! It’s been really great until now. I hope they care about these type of things.
Again, I’d like to know if Plex is working on the issue? SD says plex has a bug due to the new audio format.
Below is from someone that posted this from a response from SD support:.
The provider we get the channels through changed the audio format on the channels. It’s still a standard format, but just a different one than was used previously. Plex apparently isn’t recognizing which devices can and can’t play that format, and is not transcoding the audio for devices that can’t, which would make it a Plex bug. Plex is aware of the issue, but does not share their development status with us or anyone else, so we don’t know if or when they might do something about it.
If the “solution” is transcoding audio, then I am cancelling Premium TV. Why do the HDhomerun and Live Channels apps direct play this new audio format fine but Plex would need to transcode?
Because you’re comparing apples and oranges… Plex doesn’t work like other video apps. Generally speaking, it relies on the native player of the platform (not always but quite often) so if the video/audio formats are not compatible with that platform’s player, then Plex will transcode one or both as needed into a compatible format.
So you are saying Android’s Live Channels app doesn’t use the native player? I find that hard to believe.
edit: Did you think I was referring to Channels DVR maybe?
However, if the Live Channels app plays fine and Plex doesn’t play without transcoding, then you have your answer (unless Plex only needs to update the app/platform profile)
Well I must say that the Premium Service did not live up to its name. The AV quality was so subpar that I was going to cancel anyway. Back to CableCard it is!
One day ATSC 3.0 will be implemented and we’ll have a rich selection of OTA. Until the back to the Cox extortion plan.
