Server Version#: PlexMediaServer-1.19.4.2935-79e214ead-x86
Player Version#: Plex-1.13.0.1275-bbd8d37b-x86_64
Tuner Make/Model: Hauppauge WinTV-quadHD
Using XMLTV?: No
I’m testing Plex as a replacement to good old Windows Media Center and I have pretty much hit my tolerance of having to keep WMC running everytime Microsoft releases a Windows 10 Feature update. After a decade of WMC it’s time for it to retire.
Right now I’m just playing around with PLEX on a different PC that just has a Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD on it. The dual does a lousy job of finding channels but that’s not a Plex problem. It sucks when I was playing around with Win TV as well. It gets enough channels for my testing of the product, though.
Now that I have played around with PLEX for a while I need to start the conversion. The media center PC currently has a Hauppauge WinTV-quadHD card in it as well as two quite old AverMedia M780 Analog/ATSC cards in it. I am able to get all 6 ATSC tuners running in WMC. I realize the M780s aren’t a supported card but “maybe” I can get them to work since they are BDA, but since the Hauppauge WinTV-quadHD is a PLEX certified card I figured it may be easier to just replace the old M780s with a single quad. My fear is that PLEX will have a problem actually seeing 8 tuners across two quads.
So, that’s the million dollar question… will it work? I’ll have to uninstall WMC to install PLEX and have it see the cards so I don’t want to start that process and fail if someone else has already confirmed it won’t work…
Can confirm it works just fine for me. Have been using two QuadHDs since late 2017 in Windows 10. One thing to note is that each physical card shows up as two dual tuner devices in Plex. I can’t remember but I’m pretty sure I had to do the channel scan four times.
Once I had both cards set up in Plex I then extracted the tuning xml data from one of the tuner devices in the Plex database, tidied it up a bit, then copied it back onto all four devices (I’m sure there are instructions on the forum somewhere). That way I knew all the channel lists etc all matched. I’m a bit funny like that though, and as long as you check that all the channel lists match I’m sure you’ll be fine.
I moved to Plex after using WMC as my only way of both recording and watching TV from about 2006. Like you, I ran my WMC box alongside Plex for several months before turning WMC off for good. Although there are a lot of things I still miss about WMC, Plex has been running rock solid for me for quite a while now.
Also you can add additional TV Tuner Cards to an already setup DVR under PMS. You just need to run the channel scan for each tuner on the cards.
If you decide to run a fresh DVR you just decide to setup a fresh DVR for this you just need to whole process just once, then a shorter process for each additional tuner added.
Also best done on a system with UEFI based firmware due to the way it handles its buses, and code efficiency.
I’m still waiting for the second Quad to get shipped. I decided to go ahead and start the Plex TV setup on the WMC PC. I uninstalled WMC then installed Plex Server. It saw the existing Quad as two tuners as expected. It also saw the two old AverMedia M780 tuners and I was able to get those configured as well. All of the 6 HD tuners are set to the same channel listings. I went through every channel on live TV to make sure they all worked, and they did, although sometimes they take a while to actually start to display. Seems like Plex is reaching out to the internet for something even when asking for a local tuner live view. Certainly annoying since WMC would start without delays. That’s not a huge deal.
What is a bigger problem is a bit more perplexing. Running Plex Server and Player on the same PC. During live view it’s dropping frames. About every second on average but could be less or more than a second between drops so not consistent… It’s pretty obvious. Audio does not seem to be affected, just the video stream. This is the same machine, unaltered, that was running WMC just fine as a combo server/player- I didn’t have any live view play issues. I’m having it record a couple of things to see if recorded playback has the same problem. While in live view I monitored PC resource usage and nothing is getting remotely hit: 12 CPU cores all lightly used, 32GB memory and only 6GB in use. Disk Queue staying below 0.7 on C: where OS/apps are installed and below 0.01 on D: where the Plex libraries are. Network bandwidth not even close to being heavy, I’m just not seeing anything from the hardware side causing any slowdowns. Latest Plex Server and Player. I have turned hardware decoding both on and off with no effect. Both the web app and windows app are dropping frames. Now I’m probably onto looking at codecs / the video subsystem.
I’ve also watched some HD Web Shows at max quality and they are playing nice and smooth. Playback of recordings looks pretty smooth. I’ll say the problem is isolated to live tv at this point,
I went more nuclear and just deleted the two AverMedia tuners from the Plex config and rescanned just to be 100% sure live tv was routing through the quad. Still seeing the drops on live tv. Nothing was recording at the time and PC/OS resources weren’t stressed. I’ll start a new topic for this one since original topic has been solved.
