@ChrisAWallace said:
Have you tried using the DLNA portion of Plex to serve these recordings to your TV? I haven’t tried it but DLNA might bypass the Plex Media Servers’s transcode to the Plex client circuit. DLNA might serve the file direct to the DLNA client of your TV and then use the built-in MPEG2 decoder instead.
It is unfathomable that a secondary/tertiary function on a 2 year old device is substantially better for playback of
Plex DVR files than the originating Plex function.
But isn’t one of the primary functions of a digital tv to receive and deal with MPEG2 streams? So it should be REALLY, REALLY good at doing this. iOS doesn’t have MPEG2 support natively as I understand so it shouldn’t handle it unless you roll your own.
I think part of the fly in the ointment is that Plex seems to have decided to use modern codecs on the clients instead and use the Plex Media Server’s Transcoder as the bridge. Throw ‘whatever’ format you want into the Transcoder and it will serve it to the clients. The approach seems reasonable but the execution might be lacking.
I’ve used the Channels app for iOS a little bit. It can tune in directly to a SiliconDust tuner without problem and display the stream. Since I’ve used it on both a Dual and Extend, I assume they have built MPEG2 support (for the Dual) into the application. A different approach to a similar problem.
I don’t even have to use Plex (DLNA) to stream to my TV. TV reads files directly from a very low powered NAS, even works with a single bay MyCloud.
Totally agree about Plex’s approach. That is my point. They are leaving behind a huge market segment, by not adding mpeg2 support.
To me, Channels totally rocks. I have had their viewing apps since inception and am currently an active DVR user. Plex recording stability is not even close.
Anyway, I have over 200 mpeg2 recordings + 200 non mpeg2 files (created prior to Channels DVR) hence I would really like to use Plex as an aggregator and be able to select/playback all files (1000+) from a single source… Channels uses an internal database (so one can’t add recordings) and wasn’t designed to be a Plex substitute.
There are other aggregator/playback applications but none have the fluid functionality of combining recordings like Plex.
Even though my use case is probably more extreme than most, the basic requirement of playback of mpeg2/H.264 (Plex DVR file) is sorely lacking on Plex.
Apple devices and Windows 10 computers/tablets cannot reliably function as true playback devices (if you want to skip recorded commercials). Had success with Nvidia Shield.
If Plex wants to limit their penetration to Android, it’s OK. However, in the recorded TV world until they change their methodology to be able to playback on a range of devices, they will lose a lot of customers and credibility.
