You’re likely not missing any setting. x264 encoding is only one of many things that make a video stream compatible among devices. Though the Extend helps greatly, it’s not a 100% coverage for compatibility.
First, even the Plex Live TV/DVR states a system capable of transcoding is needed for Live TV.
See the Limitations at the bottom of the page regarding NAS devices - https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/115007689648-Watching-Live-TV
I posted in another thread regarding Roku’s all the things Plex had to do to transcode a TV stream.
Replace any mention of “Roku” in the post below with “your device”.
Most equipment just isn’t made to live stream an OTA digital TV stream over IP. Honestly, DTV is mostly older technology. 10+ years. That’s ancient history in the world of video compression tech.
Plex has to convert it to our devices. The Extend takes that single tiny part and does it for Plex, but the rest, well, Plex still has to do it for most devices.
Your devices that are usable likely require a bit less conversion.
When I select Original format in Live TV, Plex tells Extend to output MPEG2. This will have to be transcoded. Choose any other profile , and it will be H.264. But as another poster points out, for some reason Plex still transcodes, but I think its mostly audio Ac3 to aac. No-one has figured out if Plex is transcoding video since the status says “H,264 to H.264”, so maybe its just remuxing. BTW I use Rokus
From my other post. I’ve converted to a more generic any device.
Plex Server
is doing time shifting(DVR recording) while watching live. This takes CPU too.
may be converting the container - MPEG2-TS to (MP4/MKV?) (many devices don’t do mpeg2-ts over IP, even if HDHR Extend encodes video inside it to h264)
may be converting the Transport Stream (TS) to compatible HLS.
may be downsampling 20mbps+ TS stream bitrate down to lower mbps depending on client Plex setting
may be converting 60fps streams to compatible 30fps (depending on 1) network broadcast source and 2) the Plex Extend tuner’s advanced quality setting)
may be/is converting the audio stream to stereo if your device isn’t connected by HDMI to a 5.1 Dolby (AC3) receiver.
Just some pointers. There’s more to video streams than the encoding type. h264 encoding is a tiny part of a huge list of container types and content variables than just the encoding type.
Thanks for the education. And for the couple of decent links on the responses/sigs.
Not sure why one TV has no issues YET the other TV has?
… and why not work via a browser?
I wish there was some recipe to follow that says, ‘You don’t want transcoding (or force Extend to transcode)?, do this: Step1, Step2…’ but, maybe it is not known.
An important thing to understand… The settings for the HDHomeRun Extend that you set in Plex override the settings you’ve set on the device itself. They are not individual settings. Think of Plex as a remote control for the HDHR in these cases. I fought the battle looking for the perfect combination of settings for a long time not knowing they were linked.
Good question, one TV uses a Fire TV (which I dislike) and Plex/HDHR works well. The other TV uses AppleTV (which I prefer) and Plex/HDHR does not work well.
I’v got my HDHomeRun Extend set to HEAVY (Transcode Profile) and tried various Plex
Tip!: Original format means the device will not transcode to H.264 at all and instead use the native stream (usually MPEG2). We recommend using the Highest quality setting if you wish to make use of the built-in transcoding.
I’ll leave it on that setting, and just admit defeat for getting Plex to work well with with Extend, at least for me.
@mfabache - You’ll likely (I only speak to my experience, I’m not expert) get best all-around client performance on most devices if your Plex Extend setting is on “High quality (30 fps limit)”, that is, within Plex DVR extend setup itself.
That doesn’t mean it will fix all your issues - Plex still has to do lots of work on the server end before feeding to various devices, but that will at least take care of the internal encoding (x264) and FPS limits (30) many devices have.
