Any Cord Cutters / HDHomeRun users here?

[whitey]

No live TV is kinda weak IMHO, just saying, I appreciate the efforts but if the dev's went as complex as recording schedules and simply already being hooked to the HDHR tuner this should have been an easy one or first up to bat.

2cents

Keep my HDHR Channel hack installed for now I guess for livetv

BOOO

 

[PigLover]

No live TV is kinda weak IMHO, just saying,

Patience Whitey...remember that this is Beta and they've said they plan to add LiveTV before its done.

Personally I think that LiveTV without Pause/Rewind would get them a lot of "boos" too - and having DVR all done is sorta a per-requisite to that. The easiest way to do live TV with pause/rewind is to get DVR done and then deliver LiveTV as a "recording" where you play back a few milliseconds after recording. That way you only need to have one stream of code for both functions. Lots easier to maintain in the long run.

 

[whitey]

Patience Whitey.

Concur, oh yeah , that was the character trait I have been missing all my life! hah

 

[JayG30]

I'm surprised so many people are using plex. Personally I've had no interest in anything outside XBMC/Kodi and its...assortment of tools (trak.tv is pretty awesome). Only thing I could see wanting that it doesn't offer would be sharing outside my network. Emby looked pretty nice for that and some limited test I did, it seemed to work much better then Plex had when I tried it in the past.

 

[rubylaser]

I'm surprised so many people are using plex. Personally I've had no interest in anything outside XBMC/Kodi and its...assortment of tools (trak.tv is pretty awesome). Only thing I could see wanting that it doesn't offer would be sharing outside my network. Emby looked pretty nice for that and some limited test I did, it seemed to work much better then Plex had when I tried it in the past.

I used XBMC for years and loved it's customizability. As I've grown older, and added kids, Plex has become my media center of choice. It runs on just about anything, the server's ability to support remote clients (including syncing and transcoding) is awesome, parental controls make managing what is viewed much easier, and remote sharing my library with family members is also great. Plex is super easy to setup and it has a nice web GUI to manage everything. As an FYI, Plex has a trakt.tv plugin as well.

I have tried Emby numerous times and it just hasn't worked as well as Plex for me (I know it has die hard supporters, so I'm sure it's awesome too, with more time given to it).

I'm just glad there are lots of options out there. This keeps them innovating and allows people to choose the best solution for their house.

 

[JayG30]

I just find Kodi far easier to setup and it has things that plex just doesn't that I use frequently. Like I said the only thing I've ever wanted that Kodi doesn't do, because it isn't really in it's scope, is handling remote clients/transcoding. But I can honestly say I've never used that. I rip my library for home use and stream everything else on the device from the source, not using my local library and bothering with managing a whole machine for transcoding which was nothing but stutter the few times I tried it (all my rips are bluray and that didn't work out well).

What I love about trak.tv is it handles all the sync/last watched/history/resume functions that in the past XBMC would have required a SQL setup.

 

[ttabbal]

Last I looked, Plex doesn't work on Raspberry Pi 1 units. That's 3 replacements I would need, a bit much to spend when what I have works great. Kodi/XBMC has been working great on them, and with my SQL server. I like the idea of some of the features etc., but not enough to justify that much hardware. Maybe if I end up having to replace existing units anyway....

Does trakt.tv have anything I don't get from MySQL? I like having all that stuff local just in case internet goes out.

 

[rubylaser]

Last I looked, Plex doesn't work on Raspberry Pi 1 units. That's 3 replacements I would need, a bit much to spend when what I have works great. Kodi/XBMC has been working great on them, and with my SQL server. I like the idea of some of the features etc., but not enough to justify that much hardware. Maybe if I end up having to replace existing units anyway....

Does trakt.tv have anything I don't get from MySQL? I like having all that stuff local just in case internet goes out.

Rasplex should work fine on Raspberry Pi 1's

How to install RasPlex on Raspberry Pi 1 and 2?

 

[ttabbal]

Rasplex should work fine on Raspberry Pi 1's

How to install RasPlex on Raspberry Pi 1 and 2?

I think this is what I found that made me think it wouldn't work...

What are the supported platforms for Plex Media Player?

Note: Plex Media Player does not support the Raspberry Pi 1 due to both performance and resource limitations.

Reading around, it seems like Plex Media Player is where they are going, so I figured support for older software would phase out. With media projects, that phase out can be pretty fast. I could be misinterpreting the situation, but particularly for a platform I'm considering paying for, I want to be sure I'm going to be able to use it for a while.

 

[rubylaser]

I think this is what I found that made me think it wouldn't work...

What are the supported platforms for Plex Media Player?



Reading around, it seems like Plex Media Player is where they are going, so I figured support for older software would phase out. With media projects, that phase out can be pretty fast. I could be misinterpreting the situation, but particularly for a platform I'm considering paying for, I want to be sure I'm going to be able to use it for a while.

Plex Media Player (PMP) will not work on a Pi 1. OpenPHT which is what is used in Rasplex is still being supported and works fine with Plex. The Plex team is going forward with PMP and the Rasplex team are continuing to support OpenPHT.

Also, you don't have to pay for Plex to use it. The free version works fine, but limits a few features (mainly sync). Here is what you get with Plexpass (the paid version).

Plex Pass Feature Overview

 

[ttabbal]

Thanks for the clarification. It looks like things should work enough to evaluate it and decide if I want to consider switching. I like the idea of getting the HDHR set up again too, I know that needs the paid version though.

 

[rubylaser]

Thanks for the clarification. It looks like things should work enough to evaluate it and decide if I want to consider switching. I like the idea of getting the HDHR set up again too, I know that needs the paid version though.

No problem, but I would not change a working setup at this point or pay for Plex just to try out an early beta of the DVR, if that's your only reason for switching. I'd just wait until til it's more features rich, then evaluate it. Just my two cents

 

[ttabbal]

Oh, I wasn't going to jump right over. I would set up a parallel plex server and play with it for a while. Swap the SD card in a Pi for a while, maybe try the Xbox one client, etc.. The HDHR thing is pretty minor. I could fire up various ways to use it. Just curious about things.

 

[IamSpartacus]

I remember years ago when all I did was watch my media collection locally in my own home. However, now with Plex, my media is available to me wherever and whenever I want. Over at a friend's or family members house? Sure, no problem. Travelling on a plane? Breakout the tablet full of synced content. Furthermore, the ease of use amongst so many different streaming clients since the content and transcoding is all centralized makes Plex the perfect solution for my media junkie needs.

 

[ttabbal]

Got a chance to set up the Plex server and experiment. Took a while to scrape all my media, but that was expected. Overall I like the server side. It set up pretty easy in Proxmox. The biggest annoyance was networking related. It opened a port in my pfSense with uPNP, then refused to use it. Not sure what that's about. I had to try a few times with a static port assignment to get it to work. It's possible it was working and it's a UI bug, so I can cut them some slack here.

My first victim was the XBox One. I discovered that it has an IR receiver, so I set up my Harmony remote to control it as well. Overall, it works pretty well. Only a few things are annoying about it as a client for Plex.

1) It's transcode happy. This could be a Plex thing, but media that my Pi machines can play fine without transcoding in Kodi get transcoded in Plex. Stupidly, subtitles are done this way. It should be overlaying them on the client. I don't mind transcoding loads on the server if there's a decent reason for it, but if a Pi can play it back, the XBone certainly should be capable.

2) No DTS. This is Microsoft's fault, according to Plex. Not that huge of a deal, except that they changed the transcoder a while back to go from DTS to AAC. WTF? I hacked the profile to disable AAC and get AC3 now, much better. Having to transcode audio is no big deal, so I could live with this, but Plex really should default to AC3. Ideally, it would bitstream the audio to my receiver, but apparently that's Microsoft's issue as well.

3) Some of the navigation is inconsistent. Page up/down don't behave the same in some screens. In the movie list, it works as you would expect. In the episode list, page down works right, page up goes up one entry...

I also tried Android. The 1 minute playback timer is a bit short for evaluating transcode performance etc, but it worked well enough I guess. I don't watch a ton of video on my phone, but it looked good over wifi and LTE. Browsing around the library was pretty snappy, overall I like it. I'm more interested in the audio side on Android, which works well other than the 1 minute timer. Would be nice if they let me have music for testing, but I don't mind overall. I told it to import iTunes playlists, but it didn't. Meh. Could be user error. I can live without them.

I'll post again when I get a Pi running with it. Perhaps it will behave a little better with the things I didn't like about the XBox One. I'm sure it will find all new ways to annoy me though.

 

[whitey]

You'd be surprised HOW clean an interface the RasPlex release has w/ PHT base on a Pi.

Chews through ANYTHING I have thrown at it so far.

 

[IamSpartacus]

Anyone know if/how you can view your custom channels such as HDHRViewer on the Plex Roku app?

EDIT: Nvmd I got this working by enabling Channels for my Plex Home users.

 

[IamSpartacus]

Ok got my HDHR Prime hooked up and working well with both the HDHR Viewer plugin and Plex DVR. The one thing I'm missing is channel logos inside the plugin. Is anyone else using them and where did you get yours from?

 

[ttabbal]

It's been a while, figured I'd post again in case people are looking for info.

Plex with RasPlex has been working well. Performance is a bit slow sometimes, but nothing I can't live with. Replacing the TV units with Pi3 boards would likely help a lot. It seems to be CPU bound for UI stuff mostly. If I do that, I might try the PMP client Plex makes, just to try new things. I do wish they would provide an apt repository so I could auto-update the server, but I don't have to change it much, so I guess it's alright. A few high-bitrate scenes stutter here and there, I should probably turn down the max bitrate and let the server transcode those.

I was going to try the PVR stuff, but my older HDHR isn't supported. boooo... I guess I can't complain too much as it's one of the first ones made. I could still set up Myth or something if I cared enough to, but I don't think I do at the moment. The TVs all have OTA tuners built in and have antenna feeds going to them. So I can watch news etc should it be useful. That's good enough for now. I don't want it enough to buy a new HDHR.

 

[whitey]

Plex with RasPlex has been working well.

+1 for giving RasPlex a try, glad it's working out, for 'un-smart' TV's they work well, otherwise I'm typically pretty happy w/ the built-in Plex apps on smart TV's but I do dig the UI of RasPlex and find it more functional/featurefull than the base TV manufactures Plex client releases.