One of the great joys for me in the HDTV era is being able to timeshift sports. I can pause the game, go pee, grab a snack, whatever, return to the game 5-6 minutes behind and still see all. Added bonus: I can catch up to live by fast forwarding during the commercials.
I ditched WMC after 10 solid years of great service. Sure, it had it’s oddness to workaround on occasion, but it was rock solid and had features like one-button toggling between 2 channels (games) and a little known feature I found accidently… you could pause it then hit the >> key on the remote and it played slomo at about 1/4th speed.
With Plex, I get none of this for $40 a year. I can’t even rewind to see a replay without being slung back to some random time 2 quarters earlier. If I pause it for more than a short while who knows where it will start playing again.
Goddamnit, I’m mad. Step up and tell us Plex, is this fixable? Do you need to farm it out to fix it? Do you need to start from scratch and completely rewrite it? I need to know so I can move on if needed. I feel like $40 was stolen from me. Several employees hopped in this thread weeks ago and nothing, more or less, has happened since for my particular set of very common hardware.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who “wants to know” what’s being done and what the timeline is to having it completely usable.
I don’t want to pile on here or sidetrack the thread but will add that I don’t believe that Plex understands the requirements for DVR and instead has tried to shoehorn DVR functionality into their Media Server.
There are many DVR features that are missing beyond time-shifting (which this thread is about).
I came from SageTV which was exceptional (except lacked the flexibility of today’s viewing habits).
This morning after much consideration I downloaded Channels DVR and have to say it was like a breath of fresh air. Non-Destructive Commercial Skipping, a place to view my recordings whether they were in progress or not…programmable skip-ahead and back…I could go on for a while. What started off as idle curiosity has now made me consider totally abandoning Plex.
It is unfortunate that it seems DVR seems like nothing more than a marketing check-box to the folks at Plex.
I have just scheduled Fox NFL Sunday to start recording at 11:00 am central time on OTA channel 17.4 Fox HD.
I will give Plex DVR about 15 to 20 minutes time to start the recording process and then jump on to some of my Plex clients to make a video recording with my cell phone showing whether or not I can “Start Watching Recording in Progress from Beginning”.
@Smokindog
I made 3 videos showing that Plex DVR time shifting is working, at least for me.
I’m glad that Channels DVR is working for you. It may be a better fit for your needs.
For me, I can’t see spending $80 per year for that software at this time, mainly, because for me my Plex Pass Lifetime subscription is meeting my needs.
Channels DVR is very nice. There’s a showstopper for me though, no Roku support. I could run it on my HTPC but their web app is very spartan and really isn’t much more than an admin utility.
Shame really, and I bet there are plenty of Roku owners who feel the same.
That feature sort of works for me now as well (forward/back was iffy during recording) but still the overall experience is not great. Missed two football games getting recorded today, and have had enough. Downloaded Channels and will check back later to see if Plex figures this out.
Tried this with my NVidia Shield for the first time. Watch From Beginning worked well enough, but where is resume? If you have to stop playback for any reason, good luck easily getting back to where you were in the recording after being forced to restart from the beginning (especially long NFL recordings).
I only watched the Shield video and it really proved nothing as there was no context, no anchor point, no timeline and no returning to the same spot along the way. It may have worked but it also may have just been a bunch of random movement, nothing to indicate either way. Nothing was repeated and there was nothing to show order or time progression. As others have once again said above, it doesn’t work reliably, especially for the devices with the largest share of market.
If you’re happy, that’s all that matters but I doubt the handful of people claiming it works are enough to fund PLEX moving forward!
Good luck.
PS - Even though I don’t see the relevance, on the earlier comments about DirecTV DVR having issues along the way, yes they did but I don’t ever recall a reported problem existing for more than a year. OH, I was also in the “user beta test” group for many years so I’m pretty familiar with their history.
Must be your specific hdwe combination. I’m still livid over the fact I can’t do anything a DVR should do except wait until the recording is over and FF/RW freely only then. Timeshifting is still completely broken here on my Win10 server and Roku Ultra client.
I gotcha on the timeline bit. The Plex App on Shield doesn’t normally put up the timeline when you use the buttons on the remote to FF or RW. I can do another video using the time line with on screen navigation to demonstrate that it is indeed working for me. As for your comments about it just being random movements in the recording, all I can say is I really don’t have any reason to lie about this working in my environment. Plex on Shield is my main player. I’m glad that I can now watch recordings in progress with pause, FF and RW. Especially that I can now actually FF to skip through commercials on NFL games. I definitely agree that it should not take a year or more to resolve issues.
Still 100% fail on the ROKU Ultra and ATV4K. Your setup is a low runner as to market share of streaming devices sold so I would make the extension it’s also a low runner for PLEX users of LiveTV/DVR. Just look up the market saturation of the various devices.
I"m also willing to bet a nickel that your setup will fail if you did more forward/back timeshifting.
I’ll take that nichol because I watched football all last weekend after games started recording and skipped through all commercials and was able to catch up to live TV by the end of scheduled game times with no issues what so ever.
ATV4K, I suspect is an Apple TV 4k device, I will never buy into the Apple ecosystem. In fact you couldn’t pay me enough money to take any Apple device.
As for Roku. Plex has been late to join that party. The Roku TV actually belongs to my son and he only uses it as a computer monitor for his gaming system. Frankly I don’t care for the Roku OS much either.
As far as market shares for both of those devices go, You are probably correct. I couldn’t say because I have not checked those metrics . Also the market doesn’t sway my purchase decisions. I chose the nvidia shield because it had very good specs, is fairly well supported by nvidia with continued updates. And it has worked very well as my first venture after dumping DirecTV.
Giving that my setup is working for me and my DVR needs are being met at this time, I will consider myself one if the lucky ones. I wish everyone the best.
I tested this last night on a game that I started recording partway through. Linux server.
With Shield client it worked quite well. I could pause, rewind, jump forward through ads, etc. The only issue I noticed is that when RW using the scrubber controls or whatever they’re called the progress meter started to grow backwards beyond the end of the meter representing the start time of the recording. This is a bug of some sort.
However… Neither Firefox nor Chrome browser clients will play the resultant recording files. No error is given, they just spin endlessly until I give up and click the x.
Yesterday i upgraded PMS to 1.18.0.1846 and ever since we are having audio sync issues on Live TV.
Video will glitch every thirty seconds or so and each time that happens the audio sync goes out by a bit more. after about 10 seconds the audio is about 30 seconds ahead of the video.
