I have an HDhomerun and it runs for shit through Windows. But it runs perfectly within Kodi. I live in Michigan and have a rooftop antenna and with Kodi I never seem to have signal problems, even during snow storms and such. I don’t know if you have tried running your HDhomerun through Kodi but if you have not, I recommend giving it a try.
I do have two antennas. The one I used to have hooked up to the HDHomeRun is now downstairs in the living room, connected to the Xbox One through the Hauppage thingie, so that I can watch Live TV on the Xbox with up to 30 minutes delay.
The other antenna I have now is this little antenna that came with the Happauge thingie, and that’s the one I hooked up to the HDHomeRun upstairs, sitting on my computer desk. When I run the Windows App HDHomeRun, the signal on this little antenna seems fine most of the time. I mean, it’s not perfect, I guess, there’s a few signal blips here and there, which I never cared about, but I guess those signal blips wreck havoc on the way Plex records and encodes these videos, so that’s a problem now.
I’ve never installed Kodi on my computer. It sounds like a hassle compared to Plex.
I certainly wouldn’t use Kodi for PVR purposes. Works great for playing local media.
Short of getting a full on roof-mount style directional antenna, have you tried something like this (not endorsing the model/brand, just the general style). Back when I rented, I used one and it was fine once you found a good location for it.
ObWirecutterLink
Plex should be saving to a TS file unless it’s triggering a transcode. Try playing it back in something like VLC to see if it’s the Plex player or the file itself.
With the HD Homerun there isn’t much plex can do other than make sure the file is being written to the hard drive fast enough, which should be super easy for it with a modern system.
That was on the TS file, sadly, so even VLC was a bust.
Woops, missed that. Unfortunately because of how the HD Homerun works any DVR app is going to perform the same way I would think. It’s just dumping the transport stream to disk as it arrives from the Homerun.
I used the same HDHomerun back in the Windows 7 days. Windows Media Center never gave me this problem. It would just record the programs, and when I was streaming to my Xbox 360, it would just skip over the bad areas really smoothly. I suspect they recorded it differently somehow, with different encoding.
That’s the thing - the HD Homerun can’t record in a different format, it just passes on the extracted mpeg-ts from ATSC. A DVR program can transcode it afterwords, but most/all? don’t unless cutting commercials after the fact or wanting to save space. MPEG2 isn’t exactly efficient by today’s codec standards.
So one DVR program should perform the same as any other in terms of recording quality with this device. The only points of contention would be the network to the HD Homerun and the throughput to the disk, neither of which I would expect to be a factor given the stream sizes involved here. Or I guess Plex could have some dumbass buffering algorithm that is failing but again, given the other constraints that’s pretty unlikely.
Or I guess it could be failing to handle the drop outs from weak signal and not writing in key frames/whatever correctly or… really not sure who would be handling that. I would think the HDHomerun since it offers up a buffer to just plain TS players.
Is there an easy way to take the signals from two different OTA antennas and combine them for a stronger signal?
I’m currently using this antenna which comes with a powered amplifier, but still sometimes have trouble with certain stations depending on the day and weather:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01FUB4ZG8/
I’d love to be able to place two antennas in two different places but combine their signal together for use in a single tuner device.
Just grab a combiner:
https://smile.amazon.com/2512-ChannelPlus-Passing-Splitter-Combiner/dp/B00006JPEA/
You might want to filter and amplify the signals before they reach the combiner (depending on the length of run and how noisy the signals are).
Actually, the HDHomerun Extend will take the mpeg-2 signal and encode it to h.264 for you. This takes up much less space and works on weak wifi. They charge an extra hundred bucks for it though.
Cool, thanks.
I still often forget about the idea that for coaxial signals there’s no such thing as a “pure” input and output, and that a splitter could easily be used as a combiner instead.
Well, provided there aren’t diodes or something making it directional. Some are dual splitter/combiners and some are just splitters.
LOL made the same mistake myself I think. Just linked one that I’m not sure went both ways. :/
You know what, it never even hit me how reasonably priced Plex Pass is compared to the $25/year I’m paying now. I always imagined it being much more expensive but it’s really not that bad at all.
For those of you who have used Plex Pass for OTA TV, has it been reliable enough for you as long as your antenna strength is good? Is the UI friendly and easy to use?
Their site mentions offline sync - does that mean it can transfer OTA TV recordings to your mobile device for offline playback? And if so, are those recordings transcoded?
Plex Cloud also sounds awesome - I have a ton of media and music stored in my OneDrive, and Plex Cloud says it supports OneDrive. Does that mean it “automatically” works with all my OneDrive content even if I haven’t previously downloaded the content locally?
I’m might try it out for a month and just see how it all works.
Tonight I’m going to try recording The Good Place on NBC.
I just watched NBC on the HDHomeRun app for a while. The signal seems really strong today, with no artifacts. Let’s see if it can do a nice recording. Bonus points because NBC is also the channel I want to record later, when the Olympics start, obviously. Fingers crossed.
@ineffablebob has a nice review of it that he links to in this thread.
I agree with him that the way they arrange the guide is weird. It’s done by programs rather than a grid. I miss the Windows Media Player way of setting up recording, where you could see the grid, and change days and time and hit record. That was way easier to navigate than what Plex has now. But I guess you can do it the Plex way, day by day, and eventually you’ll have all your programs setup for recording.
Ah, that sounds pretty rough then. Thanks for the pointer.
Yes I played around with it, have it all setup as a toy project, but don’t actually schedule any recordings or rely on it. Seems to work great.
Offline sync means you can startup the Plex app on your phone or tablet and tap “sync” next to any video and it’ll copy itself to your device, transcoded to whatever bitrate you want so you can determine how much space it takes up. It will transcode if that bitrate is different than the native recording.
Yes it will work with your OneDrive transparently. I played around with it on Google Drive and it seemed to work fine. I can’t figure out how Plex can afford to provide that service included in the Plex Pass, particularly for people that bought lifetime subscriptions for $75 in like 2014. But so far, they do.
From that review, it’s true you can’t setup a recording by time and channel like a circa-1988 VCR but you get TV listings included in Plex Pass so rather than telling it to record CBS from 8PM to 8.33PM every tuesday, you tell it to record The Biggest Gangbang Theory, only new episodes, retain 3 on disk, delete episodes after you watch them, and stop recording 3 minutes after the endtime, and it just does that.