Live TV on Plex
plex.tv
plex.tv
I have both an OTA tuner and a CableCARD tuner. I don't really watch TV, but Comcast did the thing where it's cheaper to buy TV than to not, and I figured I'd rather have a CableCARD in a HDHomeRun box somewhere on my network instead of a set-top box in my living room.
Plex found my 120-odd cable channels, found all my broadcast channels, and it assembled a cohesive program guide with everything that I could conceivably watch with cover art and program descriptions and everything. I didn't have to register with any other services, or screw around with anything outside Plex itself. It just works™; took maybe 15 minutes to go from "Plex" to "Plex is recording stuff".
My favorite feature is something I hooked up yesterday -- automated commercial removal via a postprocessing script that invokes https://github.com/erikkaashoek/Comskip.
Net is that anyone in my household can say "I want to watch this show", Plex will record it, strip ads, and make it available on any device, and it wasn't even a pain to set up. I'm quite happy.
My plex server is Mac, so I used this guide: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1273228#Comment_12...
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200288286-What-is-...
Speaking for myself: I switched from Kodi to Plex after finding that Plex requires considerably less effort to achieve greater functionality, and the differences are things that I actually like. Your mileage may vary.
As an example, let's say I want to start watching something on a tablet and finish watching it on a TV. This is something that Kodi and Plex can both do, but let's consider the details.
Kodi needs a file server and a MySQL server, while Plex needs a Plex Media Server. Thus, Kodi talks SMB/NFS + MySQL, while Plex talks HTTPS. If you want to access your stuff remotely, Kodi needs a VPN and suffers from latency, while Plex works fine with port forwarding.
Kodi needs you to configure sharing and database access on each install, usually by editing config files. Plex needs you to log in with your Plex account and point it to the Plex server(s) you want.
Kodi needs you to jailbreak, sideload, compile it yourself, or otherwise jump through hoops if you want to watch on iOS. Plex is a download from the Apple app store.
Kodi streams files to the device and plays them there. Plex does this by default, but Plex Media Server can _also_ transcode media in realtime as needed. This means Plex can stream a 20 mbps source file over the Internet to a 1 mbps cellular connection. Plex can also transparently paper over device limitations, using the server to transcode weird video codecs into something that your device can actually play instead of just failing.
Plex Pass (the for-pay thing) can also take all this a few steps further with Mobile Sync. The server transcodes e.g. a season of a TV show into a mobile-friendly format/resolution/bitrate and copies it to a mobile device. Now you can watch that stuff entirely offline, in addition to streaming whatever you want over the Internet and streaming over your LAN, while still never losing your spot in a series. Kodi… doesn't.
(My current experience with Plex DVR vs my past experience with MythTV suggests I could write something similar for the DVR functions too.)
I generally just want to watch videos on my TV.
I have plex and kodi installed on my shield. Plex requires me to setup an account to get videos from one app to another on the same device. It also failed to launch and got stuck in a few loops before I found this out. Trying to set it up just now it asked if I wanted to launch the server, but then couldn't find it. Then when manually launching it from the internal settings menu list of installed apps it said going to the next page would add permissions for storage, but just brought up an error so again I had to go into the internal settings menu list of installed apps and enable the permissions myself. I have already ended up in a situation where it said the server was there, running and connected, but showed me no library and I had to force stop and restart the server. I've also so far not been able to find basic settings like hiding the synopsis of unwatched media.
Last time I tried to set it up was on my NAS, and it consistently tried to re-encode video files which would have played just fine when streaming.
Maybe my experience is rare, but kodi has pretty simply worked and played my files without requiring me to setup anything online. My patience for managing my media has dropped drastically over time.
I would absolutely recommend Plex Media Server as a backend. It is very powerful and has great support by the community (see PlexPy). It makes it very easy to store all my media on my home NAS and watch it from any device, even outside of my house. There isn't really anything like this for Kodi that I have found.
For frontends, Plex Media Player is alright but you can also use Kodi with the Plex plugin. This is especially useful since there are no linux builds of Plex Media Player available. I don't really have a preference for one or the other.
I think it's a pretty neat feature for people who still find it hard to get away from TV for reasons like the live channels (sports). They can still make use of DVR features and watch stuff on Plex like they don't even have a tv subscription. Except in this case they still get the big bill every month and lovely commercials.
They are talking about OTA channels that play sporting events.
ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox all broadcast live sporting events of some sort.
To me that doesn't mean the free over the air channels that occasionally show sports. But hey, that's me.
I can't imagine I'm the only one. Sports is pretty much the only thing I can't get from iTunes or streaming.
I assume everybody wants all of them in all markets, it's just a different strategy of when to make something available. E.g. what if you're like me, and primarily watch college sports on ESPN, and don't really care about NBC or Fox locals in your market?
Honestly it's painful at this point watching regular tv when my internet goes down. It seems like Plex should still work in that case though.
Of course some cableTV providers (Time-Warner/Spectrum in particular) mark every program with CCI 0x02 "copy-once" DRM, and very few DVRs other than TiVo and Windows Media Center (RIP) allow you to record that due to standard cable company evil.
(I heard that's part of why Microsoft dropped CableCard support in Windows 10 because the cable companies decided to not-so-quietly kill it and have made it almost impossible to get them if you don't already have one and have been slowly dropping support even for those that already have them.)
Edit: I just saw their Supported DVR Devices and Antennas web page[1] and ATI isn't listed :(
This likely means any premium channel can't be recorded and according to get channels it goes beyond HBO or Showtime: > As of mid-2015, Verizon FIOS has enabled DRM on FOX affiliate channels like Fox News and Fox Sports.
Also Plex DVR is a true DVR-- it will actually record those programs to disk, not just watch them live with trick play. It couldn't do live TV before, that's what was just added.
In open source land, MythTV already does everything better except UI and install/setup. Those are very large exceptions to random consumers.
Plex offers everything in a single package, with two distinct advantages. First, it's client/server and will stream your programs anywhere over the internet. And second, it has great fully supported apps for every platform under the sun-- and if you don't like the apps its web UI is fabulous too! But, not open-source or free.
When I google solutions to these problems, I find threads up to two years old and end with Plex staff 1) not responding, or 2) saying, "We'll fix it eventually." And after two years they haven't!
That's not even counting how buggy or nonfunctional most channels are.
So glad I never bought the Plex Pass- wouldn't be right to give these people any more money when their product is so unreliable.
I have a >10tb collection in Plex and stream to a Nexus Player (among many other devices, some over WAN) with zero issues. The biggest "issue" I've ever faced is that sometimes I need to lower my playback quality to 720p when I'm streaming over WiFi.
So glad I bought the lifetime Plex pass- I am happy to support the folks who made such a reliable and lovely product.
Generally speaking, if you are having issues with a product that is almost universally beloved by tens of thousands of paying customers, the issue is most likely on your end.
edit: The downvoters are going wild in this thread. Anyone who advocates Plex is being buried. For a moment I thought I was back on reddit!
I've been running Plex off of a Freenas server franksteined together from spare parts (from pc upgrades) for nearly 10 years now. The Plex clients I use are Roku, PS3, App, and Browser. I've never had significant problems, I even ended up buying a lifetime Plex Pass.
Plex crashes constantly on my Roku. (This may no longer be true, as I haven't touched it in a year because it crashes so much). That's not low quality hardware, it's bad app.
I expect a dedicated hardware device for streaming videos that can stream Netflix, Hulu, Sling, etc, to be able to stream Plex.
The crash could very well be caused by some kind of incompatibility or issue with your server.
I'm sure that you've combed through your event logs on the server to verify this isn't the case, though.
>I expect a dedicated hardware device for streaming videos that can stream Netflix, Hulu, Sling, etc, to be able to stream Plex.
Why would you expect Plex, which plays back content served up by an environment which you control and maintain, to have similar compatibility as Netflix or Hulu, which plays back content served up by a multi-million dollar CDN infrastructure?
That's like saying "I expect my self-hosted WordPress blog to have the same level of reliability and usability as CNN.com" -- it's unreasonable to put the burden on WordPress/Plex when you are the one who manages the server that the content is served from.
Again: it seems to me that the issue is on your end, and not Plex's, because there are thousands of people who have no issues running Plex with Roku.
It's a fantastic product, and I haven't even had to pay for it. I really ought to get a lifetime plex pass at some point.
Either way, you could either:
a. Take the time to organize your library, like anyone who successfully uses Plex has.
or
b. Provide metadata to the open databases that Plex uses, to help both yourself and the next person who needs it.
The important thing to remember is that Plex is not made by wizards... it's software, and for it to catalog your library you need to name your files in a way that it can comprehend.
The notion of being able to find and play a file that isn't a formal mainstream movie doesn't seem all that obscure to me, and doing a search on filename isn't exactly what I'd classify as wizardry or difficult to implement. At the very least it doesn't seem like a crazy idea.
I believe the main difference between them was that Aereo "hosted" the antenna's themselves and sold you the stream, whereas Plex is a "set up yourself" service.
I started a dozen or so years ago with MythTV and a Hauppauge tuner card, in an old PC directly connected to the (one) TV, and using an IR remote to control it. Over time I added another dual tuner card, and had both cable and OTA channels. MythTV had commercial skipping built in, and as I watched basically 100% recorded content, this was the beginning of me never seeing commercials.
Eventually I moved into a bigger house and got married, and we had two TVs. I didn't have a space PC, nor did I want to have an entire PC dedicated to being a client -- and at least at the time, using multiple MythTV clients with a single server was a bit clunky. After seeing the nice setup at a friend's, I jumped to SageTV and started using their media extender boxes (HD300)[1]. As a SageTV client they were better in every way: cheaper, less power, zero maintenance.
The HD300 remote even had programmable "TV power" and volume buttons, so since that was the only device connected it was also the only remote I needed. This feature has never been matched, and since moving away from SageTV I've always had either two remotes or had to program a Logitech Harmony remote.
I even moved the SageTV server PC to a utility room, disconnecting it from the TV and replaced it with an HD300.
SageTV still supported my tuner cards, and though not built-in, there were plugins to do commercial skipping. At some point in there I had also switched to a SiliconDust tuner to get digital channels.
Then, Google bought SageTV [2] and basically killed the core product.
It was around the same time my cable company was encrypting the last of all their digital channels (so my tuner cards were not usable anymore) and I was considering Netflix, so I started looking for a device to replace the HD300 that could still get SageTV content, but also Netflix, YouTube and whatever else.
I went through a bunch of sub-par solutions: BluRay player, Roku box, some other (pre-Android) streaming box and a Chromecast. I even resorted to low-power mini-ITX PC running Windows -- but the only way to get NetFlix was to use a keyboard and mouse. The Chromecast came close, but it was annoying to have to use a phone/laptop to view anything.
Everything just felt like it was getting worse and worse from my old SageTV setup. SageTV couldn't handle NetFlix, and even the SageTV YouTube app broke because YouTube's old API was finally discontinued.
We moved again, and had a child (and our TV viewing went down considerably), so really just use a single TV now. I eventually settled on using an Nvidia Shield (running AndroidTV), and it's better in basically every way except for OTA/cable/DVR stuff -- and so we entirely dropped that. I stuck the Chromecast on the other TV that we just use for the treadmill and can live with that.
There's a certain irony here. There's a lot more available on Digital OTA now (getting around encrypted digital cable), and now the current software that runs on modern hardware is able to do Live TV and DVR again... but is it relevant?
For one, I've spent 12 years without commercials, so without the automatic commercial skip even the DVR isn't that interesting to me. Secondly, I've replaced all my old media sources and/or stopped caring about the ones I couldn't replace.
It seems to me that DVR software, the client hardware and online media software/services have all had their own peaks and valleys over the years, and they've never all peaked at the same time.
The combination of HD300-style client hardware, with AndroidTV's online content apps, SageTV's LiveTV/DVR/commercial skipping, and the unencrypted digital cable of ~2010 would be my ideal -- I just don't ever see it happening ever again.
[1] http://www.geektonic.com/2010/08/sagetv-hd300-hd-theater-gee... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=google+buys+sagetv&tbm=nws
Suggests this is means local over air TV. So whatever you get by just plugging antenna into your TV directly.
[0] http://tvfool.com/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=29
This part is incorrect. Plex only needs to transcode at the time the media is being played and really only scans when changes to the media directory are detected and/or on a schedule you define.
This is such a bogus statement. The impact that Plex has on your computer is directly tied to the processing power of said computer.
I run Plex with a >10tb media collection on my >2 year old desktop, and I am able to play games such as PUBG, DayZ, Arma 3, Overwatch, etc with absolutely no hindrance.
This is my build: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/QVKMrH
edit: I'd also argue that Plex has a vastly superior interface, as well as metadata handling, compared to Kodi. Kodi is basically "the poor man's Plex."
No, you don't. Source: I've had an account for years and am not paying anything.
> it's a PIA to setup and configure.
You add folders to a TV and Movies collection once. With Kodi, you're doing it N times, where N is the number of Kodi installs in your house.
> Once configured, don't plan on using the computer you setup the Media server on as it is always busy/ bogged down scanning files and transcoding video
As others have stated, this is not the case. My Plex server is an old Core2Duo MacBook Pro that also runs virtual machines.
From https://www.plex.tv/blog/well-do-it-live/ Remember, Plex Live TV and DVR is a Plex Pass only feature, and is immediately available for Plex Pass users. You can find out more info about Plex Live TV and DVR here as well.
>You add folders to a TV and Movies collection once. With Kodi, you're doing it N times, where N is the number of Kodi installs in your house.
Never had any success in Plex detecting all my content properly. It's a luck of the draw if you want your content tagged appropriately. I use a MySQL database to store my media library, all I need to do is point Kodi in that direction and everything is synchronized.
> As others have stated, this is not the case. My Plex server is an old Core2Duo MacBook Pro that also runs virtual machines.
You all must have a small media library
Apologies, but it didn't seem like you were talking about that single feature when you said "you need to pay for the service".
> all I need to do is point Kodi in that direction
Which is great, but again, with Plex you don't even need to point. It just finds the server on the network.
> Never had any success in Plex detecting all my content properly
That's definitely annoying. But I built a Plex Channel for my downloads, and it names files according to what Plex expects.
> You all must have a small media library
~4TB of networked storage, but yeah, maybe that's small?
But be a good person and pay for PlexPass.