TiVo has long performed well with time-delayed recording/watching–one can start recording “the game” and start watching it after say 1 hour, with thumbnails, commercial skipping, etc. and catch-up to the live broadcast.
Plex’s option has long needed improvement with no updates in sight. Plex does offer to start playing the live recording when the recording started (in addition to watching live) but:
If one wants to watch a live recording with extra time added to the end (to record possible overtimes), THERE IS NO WAY TO SELECT IT the recording if/when the scheduled recording time has ended–the game recording is NOWHERE TO BE FOUND in any Plex interface until the recording silently ends on the server and finally appears on the recent recording list after processing. That sucks. It would be nice to see a “current recording” screen so that one can select/watch the game that has +1 hour added to the end.
There are no thumbnails when watching a recording in-progress.
There’s no auto-commercial-skip when watching a recording in-progress.
Often, the FFW gets off (or crashes?), and then Plex starts playing the LIVE feed, with the LIVE scores showing–SPOILER! (This is on a LAN, so no connection issues/delays.)
Thanks. The first point is about the inability to select “currently being recorded” shows. Currently, the only way to see them is to pick them from the LIVE channel grid–usually OK.
However, if the game ended at 2pm, and the game recording is set to add +1 hour, and it happens to be 2:01pm, then the user needs to wait another hour+ before being able to BEGIN watching this game because there is NO PLACE to select it on the Plex interface at that time. It’s as though the game fell in to the abyss. It’s really a lack of testing/using on Plex’s part or else it would seem obvious to the developers.
I hope they soon add a “currently recording” tab to the Live TV page that includes shows that are currently recording the extra minutes/hours after the scheduled ending–very common with sports games. Otherwise, these recordings are absolutely inaccessible until much much later.
What no one is actually saying to you is that “there is no hope”. These limitations have been there for over 4 years that I know of. We are supposed to be able to watch recordings in progress so that we don’t have to wait until recording is over. It’s a bug that we can’t do that. They are removing the playback interface on the guide before recording has completed. It’s a bug. When we ask for this to be fixed, it’s not a new feature. It’s a bug and it should have been fixed a long time ago.
Yes. All those “lifetime” passes will eventually ruin any company. There aren’t many OTR DVR options out there anymore (Amazon is killing its Recast support in a few years). It would be nice if Plex would open-source some things and/or support a robust plugin community that could fix/complete such features.
There’s a very recent new suggestion focusing specifically on the option to support commercial detection/skipping for recordings in progress.
With all individual bullet points of the OP being addressed in other existing suggestions, I’ll close this thread as a duplicate. I recommend everyone interested in those features to comment/vote in the respective thread.
