After hundreds of $ in antennas and tuners and weeks of time trying to get the Plex PVR to work acceptably (including using MCEBuddy to compress the recorded shows) I gave up on the Plex PVR and purchased basic TV from my Internet provider which includes a basic cloud PVR. Their app to access it isn’t available on the Roku Ultra so I purchased a 4k Firestick and WOW what a difference!
I have faithfully upgraded my rokus to the latest highest power, Ethernet conneced Rokus year after year thinking I had the best possible streaming experience.
I custom buillt a high end server with 12 processors to feed my Plex beast and the server has worked great with everything, well, except wheh it came to the Plex DVR which I could never get to work satisfactorialy.
The biggest problem I had was that the broadcast ATSC TV recordings create mega huge .ts files on my server which just would not play well on my roku. They took forever to start and would crash continuously while watching. My short term solution was to install MCEBuddy to automatically compress every broadcast as soon as it was saved. But this became ‘old’ very quickly. It spun up my after every recording. Making it noisy and hot all through the day and night as shows were finished. And I couldn’t watch a recorded show until BOTH after it finished being broadcast and then transcoded with MCEBuddy. Of course after the compression everything worked great.
But this became too much of a kludge, so I reluctantly bought TekSavvy’s internet TV services and cloud PVR. Their app isn’t available on the Roku so I need to buy a firestick to get it to work.
Out of curiosity I fired up Plex on the Firestick and holy cow! It solved my biggest Plex PVR problem. It played back the native TS files flawlessly, instantly, without transcoding either before or by the Plex server on playback and without any lag! And it did this through my local Wifi without even requiring a wired Ethernet connection. It’s a dream come true on that front.
I’ve also noticed it solved a years long problem I’ve had with anything but SRT subtitles. All formats of subtitles playback fine on the Firestick where the Roku fumbled them time and time again.
All the above said, I still can’t in good conscience recommend the Plex OTA TV DVER experience for two main reasons;
OTA Live TV just doesn’t work. I’ve never been able to get the guide or the live TV on Plex to work on EITHER of the Roku or Firestick. I can see/use the guide and watch live TV on my Plex Server but not on ANY device (not on my iPad or iPhone either).
Can’t watch a show while recording. If I set a show up to record OTA on Plex, I can’t find any way to play it back as its recording on either my Roku or Firestick or iphone or ipad.
I appreciate Plex’s efforts and would REALLY love to have my OTA DVR actually work with the rest of my Plex content. But it’s clearly not there yet.
I can NEVER get an EPG to show-up on any of my rokus, iPad, iPhone or firestick.
[UPDATE: After posting this post, I checked my iPhone and iPad again and the EPG DOES work on those devices. And I can click on live shows and they play, and I can set recording options on them too. So strange. They never did before. Not a solution as I rarely use either to watch TV. Nevertheless the EPG still doesn’t work on my firestick or roku. What the heck? Same server, works on my iOS devices but not my streaming sticks/boxes.]
If I go to the “guide” tab on the Live TV 'libary it says “Error Loading Content” on my Firestick and on the Roku its says “There was an error laoding the Guide…please try again later”. I’ve been ‘trying again later’ for two months now and its never worked. I even completely wiped my
HDHomeRun FLEX DUO installation ‘twice’ and it never worked. And its not the HDHomeRun. I tried the HAUPPAUGE 1682 WinTV-quadHD tuner first back in September (it was a disaster, could barely get it to work with Plex at all) for a couple weeks before switching to the HDHomeRun and cold never get live tv to work on the Roku back then either.
The ‘What’s on Now’ tab works. I can click on each of the icons for what’s on now and they will play on the Firestick. They play very slowly and jankily on the Roku but immediately oh the Firestick. I don’t watch Live TV so that’s laregely useless for me.
Because I can’t get the EPGs to work on either the Roku or firestick I have to program my recordings on my server. Which, of course, is another pain point and another reason I’ve largely abandoned the Plex DVR.
I guess "I could’ erase the HDHomerun and try a fifth time (twice with the Hauppage and twice with teh HD Homerun so far) instance and try again but I’m feeling it will be a waste of time. Given how hard it is to set up the recordings, I really don’t want to have to go through all that again unless there is something obvious I missed.
I’ve googled and searched and tried everything I can to figure out what I did wrong that results in my EPG NOT working and can’t find anything. My best guess is that because I live in Canada I’m an outlier and their might be something different here. Haven’t found anyone in Canada using Plex as a DVR to compare notes with.
By point of comparison. I used the Tivo Series 3 and Bolts for decades before Tivo stopped supporting Canadians and they worked extremely well until each of those boxes died their natural deaths. Figured I’d finally move on since Tivo clearly doesn’t want Canadian customers any more. But, as I type this, perhaps my best bet is to see if I can find someone with an old used, working Bold with a lifetime subscription and buy that from them.
Very weird, never seen that issue myself, the guide just appeared on all my clients once I added the DVR.
Only things I can suggest, try a fresh Plex server install on another system, and looking at the server and client logs when you try and access the EPG to see if they show anything that may help.
