Hey - I’ve had similar experiences unfortunately, with a HDHomeRun Connect Quattro running over a Synology NAS 718+. In addition to your challenges with the Connect, I’ve got further complications and data which I’ll share below.
In the Windows HDHomeRun app, the quality is consistently high and streaming very, very rarely has issues. Once I tune the same channel in Plex, there is some buffering and stuttering from time to time.
Now, of course, the stream goes over the PMS, so of course one more link is introduced to the chain.
Scheduled recordings actually store with less issues and, when streamed off at a later date, buffer at other times each time they are played. So I don’t think it’s the streams coming into the PMS, but rather the dual responsibility of receiving the TV stream and (potentially) transcoding it of again.
In general, I think the issue is around MPEG2 streams; ironically h.264 HD signals are much less prone to hiccups, buffering and missing key-frames than SD MPEG2 streams - though I have a separate issue with 1080p streams which I’ll talk about below).
It seems the Plex Media Player doesn’t support direct playback of MPEG2 streams, or the PMS decides to transcode for h.264 format to limit bandwidth usage. It is, however, utterly failing:
This is a picture of the resource utilization when watching a single SD (MPEG2) stream. As you can see, the incoming signal from the HDHomeRun Connet tuner is about 300 kb/s, but the outgoing, hw-transcoded h.264 stream varies drastically in size, but certainly averages way higher than what is received from the tuner.
Compare this to receiving a HD h.264 stream:
Here, the incoming stream from the tuner to the PMS is higher (makes sense, as the quality is better) and the outgoing stream mirrors the incoming stream (as it’s direct-streamed) - on top of that, the outgoing stream to play HD h.264 TV content averages way less than the transcoded MPEG2 SD TV content.
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I bet the problems we are experiencing with stuttering is most evident with MPEG2 streams, which are suboptimally transcoded to h.264 streams of less quality and higher bandwidth requirements. It would be interesting if the Plex devs could add an advanced setting to not transcode MPEG2 TV streams if the player could natively support it; I bet this would fix the majority of issues I’m seeing at least. I should add that the Synology 718+ NAS has an Apollo Lake intel CPU with Quick Sync hw-transcoding capabilities, so maybe my problem is regional to the hardware I’m running on.
The HDHomeRun app plays MPEG2 and h.264 streams natively, directly from the tuner on the LAN (what else could it do, it’s has no middle-man) so displays none of the issues with SD MPEG2 streams being transcoded - therefore, they are much better, IMHO.
