UK Freeview - SD channels working but no HD

Live TV & DVR Community Supported DVR Tuners
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Server Version#: UnRaid 7.1.4
Player Version#: Plex Version 1.41.9.9961 opened in a browser from UnRaid
Tuner Make/Model: TurboSight TBS 6281SE DVB-T/T2/C dual tuner card

I have just bought Plex Pass and managed to set up my TV tuner but it’s not seeing any HD channels and since Plex doesn’t offer support via email, I hope you can help.

Plex is running in a Docker container in UnRaid (all up to date). I have a TBS 6281SE DVB-T/T2/C dual tuner card and am using it in DVB-T/T2 mode for Freeview here in the UK. I have the DVB-Driver plugin installed with the TBS-OpenSource package selected.

I have set up the Live TV & DVR section in Plex and have the SD channels working but it doesn’t see the HD (DVB-T2) channels at all. They usually appear between 101-199 in the programme guide but are completely missing. They are broadcast on their own mux (586MHz here) and it seems that either Plex isn’t picking up the T2 tuners or it’s ignoring that mux.

I’ve spent hours with ChatGPT trying to resolve this (it makes a lot of mistakes so it’s hard work) but now I am completely stuck. It suggested trying TVHeadEnd and it can see and play the HD channels so it appears the problem is with Plex. ChatGPT did suggest using TVHeadEnd to feed Plex with the channels but I’d rather not over-complicate it like that.

I tried ‘Delete DVR’ but it didn’t offer a new scan and pressing ‘Rescan’ didn’t do anything.

Can you offer any suggestions? I checked old posts but didn’t find anything useful.

Thanks,
Simon.

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Your tuner is not in the Plex offically supported tuners.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/225877427-supported-dvr-tuners-and-antennas/

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I hadn’t thought to check as I already had the card. That’s unfortunate, it works with SD channels but not HD and doing more research it seems that it’s pretty much a known problem with Plex that people have been complaining about for years as the links at the bottom of this post shows.

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If you’re looking for a tuner card, Plex support for Hauppauge is pretty good. I have a Hauppauge WinTV-QuadHD tuner card in my Ubuntu 24.04.02 LTS server in Raid, and its does a fine job. They don’t last forever, so I keep a spare handy.

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Thanks, I don’t really need it, I had the tuner card handy and it was one of the benefits of Plex Pass but not necessary.

1 Like
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I used to run same setup, unRAID, Plex docker and TBS 6285 (quad DVB-T2) and had the same issue.

It’s a problem with Plex.

My solution was run 2 additional dockers:

  1. tvheadend which will have the tuner attached and can see DVB-T2 HD channels fine
  2. antennas which emulates a HDHomeRun

Plex then connects to the antennas presented HDHomeRun, which in turn speaks to tvheadend.

I am still running a very similar setup now but have moved to a DVB-S2 card for Freesat.

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Thanks, that’s good to know. I came across instructions for using tvheadend to pass the channels to Plex but it seemed a bit convoluted. Decoding is working fine for now and I have jellyfin installed to handle the videos that it can’t. Plex’s UI is so much nicer so I won’t be moving to jellyfin but I do like that hardware decoding in included by default.