Plex DVR Beta

[Taddeusz]

The Plex DVR was made public some time ago.

But yesterday they released the latest version which adds support for legacy HDHomeRun tuners. It's no longer limited to just the newest ones.

Going to play around with it a little bit.

[Taddeusz]

The lack of a traditional timeline is annoying.

I have the same annoyance with Sling TV.

[farscapesg1]

I agree the lack of traditional grid layout is annoying, but I'm slowly accepting it. My bigger complaint is the lack of being able to schedule recordings or really do anything with it outside of their web interface. We've moved to Roku devices in the house and having to use a laptop or other device to schedule anything is annoying and gets dumped on me to handle

The other issues I have with it are the lack of LiveTV (mitigated with the HDHomeRun Viewer channel in Plex, but that has some issues of it's own) and the lack of any comskip support. I run MCEBuddy against the recordings to compress and generate EDL files and if Plex would at least read them as chapter markers that would be something. I have yet to ever get commercial skip detection to be 100% accurate, so I can't set MCEBuddy to automatically cut out commercials and I don't feel like spending the time to manually flag and cut them for things I'm going to just delete after watching anyways.

On the plus side.. the recordings have been 100% reliable with my HDHomerun. My old SageTV server would intermittently throw recording halt errors using the same tuner, which would result in split files at best, complete recording failures at worst. During the Summer Olympics for example, I would say 1 in 4 recordings would fail.

[nycjoe]

I just recently tried plex dvr again.. After 10+ years w/sagetv, I find it impossible to schedule recordings via a webui. And no EPG? forget it.

[wayner]

The other issue that I have had with Plex is that it isn't easy to skip around in recordings. I do this all the time when watching sports to zip through dead time and nothing else is as good as Sage at quickly skipping through a file.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by wayner

The other issue that I have had with Plex is that it isn't easy to skip around in recordings. I do this all the time when watching sports to zip through dead time and nothing else is as good as Sage at quickly skipping through a file.

I agree, because it transcodes everything skipping around becomes problematic.

Personally I don't like having both SageTV and Plex. Essentially redundant systems. I'm torn between the two however. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Plex is definitely better at remote and mobile. SageTV is better at raw streaming locally. SageTV could be better with remote and mobile but development doesn't seem to be actively moving in that direction. If I had the time I would try and improve this.

[wayner]

Agreed regarding the remote and mobile. I have Plex installed but I tend to use AirVideoHD for remote viewing on my mobile devices - which are pretty much all iOS. The UI isn't pretty but it does have a 30 second fwd skip and it shows you thumbnails as you drag along the timeline of the file. But it doesn't work so well for currently recording files - but that is the same with everything other than Sage.

[bnh]

Originally Posted by farscapesg1

The other issues I have with it are the lack of LiveTV (mitigated with the HDHomeRun Viewer channel in Plex, but that has some issues of it's own) and the lack of any comskip support. I run MCEBuddy against the recordings to compress and generate EDL files and if Plex would at least read them as chapter markers that would be something. I have yet to ever get commercial skip detection to be 100% accurate, so I can't set MCEBuddy to automatically cut out commercials and I don't feel like spending the time to manually flag and cut them for things I'm going to just delete after watching anyways.

i've had some initial success converting the .EDL file into a .CHAP file and then using ffmpeg to remux those markers directly into the MP4 file.
http://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-formats.html#Metadata Section 5 describes the format.

Seems to work for MP4 containers with MPEG2 and H264 content thus far. i want to test using other containers and codecs. Thus far Plex for Web, and VLC honor the markers. I haven't tested other players nor plex clients yet.

As stated above, if the stream is transcoding, i'm not positive it will work well.

also Plex for Web doesn't display the markers on the timeline, but for what little i've watched, skipping over the commercial that i'm seeing with the press of button is far better than trying to FFWD.

[Taddeusz]

My method is basically playing whack a mole guessing where the ad break ends. Actually gotten pretty decent at guessing.

[bnh]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

My method is basically playing whack a mole guessing where the ad break ends. Actually gotten pretty decent at guessing.

but if you actually had a defined mark, as identified by comskip, you could just press the <step_forward> key to just go to the next scene (or the next mark), instead of assuming that all commercial breaks are ~3.5 minutes long. now, i realize comskip isnt perfect either, but i'd rather rely on its logic than whacking the mole as you say.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

I agree, because it transcodes everything skipping around becomes problematic.

Personally I don't like having both SageTV and Plex. Essentially redundant systems. I'm torn between the two however. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Plex is definitely better at remote and mobile. SageTV is better at raw streaming locally. SageTV could be better with remote and mobile but development doesn't seem to be actively moving in that direction. If I had the time I would try and improve this.

I've used both Plex and SageTV for quite a while. Plex is all movies. SageTV is well for TV.

When I used My Movies I used SageTV for everything. I had PC clients and getting playback to work wasn't worth the hassle.

Now that I'm using Android TV clients I guess they'd play back just fine, but I'm already pretty locked into Plex and starting metadata from scratch with a 1500+ movie collection doesn't sound fun.

Plus, Plex does a lot that sage doesn't, but that is another discussion.

[SWKerr]

Originally Posted by bnh

i've had some initial success converting the .EDL file into a .CHAP file and then using ffmpeg to remux those markers directly into the MP4 file.
http://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-formats.html#Metadata Section 5 describes the format.

Seems to work for MP4 containers with MPEG2 and H264 content thus far. i want to test using other containers and codecs. Thus far Plex for Web, and VLC honor the markers. I haven't tested other players nor plex clients yet.

As stated above, if the stream is transcoding, i'm not positive it will work well.

also Plex for Web doesn't display the markers on the timeline, but for what little i've watched, skipping over the commercial that i'm seeing with the press of button is far better than trying to FFWD.

MCEBuddy has an option to mark the chapters using comskip when I convert them to mp4 files.

The real challenge is how to conveniently use the markers. The only good use I have found so far is with the Emby X1 client. Oddly it is not mapped to the X1 controller but just to the skip button on the remote. Every other client I have tired, Plex and Emby X1, FireTV and MiBox, all have multi steps to use the chapter markers. Faster to just to use the 30 sec skip.

[SWKerr]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

The lack of a traditional timeline is annoying.

I have the same annoyance with Sling TV.

Emby actually has the traditional Guide. It will also stream live TV. I have been playing around with Emby and Plex lately
But...have been using the HDHomeRun DVR app for recording. I use MCEBuddy to process the files to mp4 anyway and the HDHR DVR has rock solid playback across all my devices if I want to watch something before it is processed to a MP4.

Ultimately I will pick either Emby or Plex and Emby is winning right now becasue of the traditional guide and support for chapters\comskip.

[farscapesg1]

Originally Posted by bnh

i've had some initial success converting the .EDL file into a .CHAP file and then using ffmpeg to remux those markers directly into the MP4 file.
http://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-formats.html#Metadata Section 5 describes the format.

Seems to work for MP4 containers with MPEG2 and H264 content thus far. i want to test using other containers and codecs. Thus far Plex for Web, and VLC honor the markers. I haven't tested other players nor plex clients yet.

As stated above, if the stream is transcoding, i'm not positive it will work well.

also Plex for Web doesn't display the markers on the timeline, but for what little i've watched, skipping over the commercial that i'm seeing with the press of button is far better than trying to FFWD.

Yeah, I've got MCEBuddy adding the chapter markers, but unfortunately the Plex app for Roku doesn't recognize them and even if they did, chapter support in their Roku app blows since it is a multi-step process to skip chapters. I realize that I'm wanting a simple device to handle my needs, but it doesn't seem like it should be so hard to allow the right direction pad button just skip to the next chapter marker

I may need to try out Emby again. I really didn't like their old interface (Plex just seemed cleaner and better for the big screen, IMO), but with their redesign it might work. I also noticed better transcoding performance with PLEX over EMBY, and and at time the EMBY IOS app didn't allow user switching.

Getting the family to switch.. AGAIN... might be the biggest hurdle May need to think about a different streaming device, but the Roku3's I have handle everything except the DVR aspect pretty well and I don't see myself spending more than a $100 per device.