Can anybody suggest or recommend TV Capture cards that are able to be used with Plex Live TV & DVR on Windows 10.
HDhomerun devices. Work better than internal cards, IMHO and are OS- and driver-independent.
I am building a Media Centre so they have to be internal.
@“mjsaunders999@gmail.com” said:
I am building a Media Centre so they have to be internal.
Why? Plex is a media server. As such, it lives in a network.
The TV tuner is situated best near the antenna, to get optimum reception and avoid losses on the analog antenna cable. The signal is then transported by network wiring to the Plex server.
You don’t need to think of Plex as a “media box”. That is what Kodi does.
You really think so?
‘A media center PC is a personal computer designed for use with a digital TV in the home entertainment area, to serve Internet-based and local content. Media center PCs can be as simple as a general market computer with a video output such as HDMI or a display port for downloading and streaming content on the TV screen’ Whatis.com
Dont worry I have found the supported Cards
https://support.plex.tv/articles/225877427-supported-dvr-tuners-and-antennas/
at my house the signal is virtually the same at the antenna’s pre-amp as it is at any of the device input terminals and THE LAST thing I want is some capture device changing MPEG-2 streams to H264 - and packing them up in a non-compliant container - because some idiot designer thinks it’s better somehow…
New and Improved may be New, but rarely is it Improved - as Plex proves every day.
B)
Juice, please don’t talk about things you haven’t tested yourself.
My HDhomerun doesn’t change anything. It delivers the digital stream as-is to Plex.
(What Plex afterwards does with it, is a different discussion. )
I can tell you that you’ll get the source format. In the past, I did receive MPEG2 streams with it (in SD), now H.264 and lately HEVC.
All of these get recorded without conversion, because I didn’t activate the associated checkbox.
Well, that’s good to know. One of these days - if I live long enough - I might have to buy a new tuner card. All I have to go on is the horror stories I read here on this forum wherein these new and improved capture devices provide H264 streams packed up in blablaTS containers.
I’m already working with non-compliant WTV containers - that ARE compliant with my VideoReDo TV Suite 5 that I use for frame accurate editing - that would be quite impossible with an H264 stream. After that MCEBuddy does it’s magic and my Roku Direct Plays everything it turns out.
TS ( = Transport Stream) is the closest you get to the original format that is broadcast.
The only difference might be, that with digital TV nowadays, the original transport stream contains several tv stations (multiplexing).
The unwanted stations are usually already filtered out by the receiver device/card.
There are receivers which can give you the full, original data stream as well. It’ll be in TS format.
I’m sure not going to get any TS containers from WMC - and as long as it keeps working I’ll be using it.
We’ll have to cross new bridges when/if we get to them I guess.
@JuiceWSA said:
I’m sure not going to get any TS containers from WMC - and as long as it keeps working I’ll be using it.
That’s because it’s a Microsoft product.
Back then when they developed WMC, they always had to reinvent the wheel, preferably incompatible to the rest of the world.
It was touch and go there for a while when WMC wasnt included in Win10, but we got by that one. Everything is still working fine - so far, so good.
