Playing with Plex DVR

[adam1991]

I'm having some weird issue with my WMC rig all of a sudden, but it's not the biggest deal in the world now that the season is over. So, I decided to play with the Plex DVR setup.

Every time I look at another DVR, I shake my head in wonderment. I think, certainly these people have seen ReplayTV and WMC, right? Apparently not. So a bunch of the stuff that is immediately obvious and blatantly good, somehow doesn't get into these new DVR setups. The one thing I found right away: I love being able, in the WMC guide, to click on the channel number itself and see a screen with a rolling list of what's on *that* channel for the next two weeks.

You'd think Plex would do that, but no.

Anyway, on to more important things: Plex's DVR works, but honestly I think Plex overall is a hot mess. They keep bringing out updates that add new features, and claim to fix problems, but they end up breaking working things. And they don't have any mechanism for responding to users on their forum.

If I'm going to have a DVR, it will skip commercials. So I set it up, asked it to skip (actually remove! scary) commercials. I even grabbed a tweaked .ini file from the comskip forums. And....it doesn't skip commercials. Doesn't even pretend to process the file. Some searching reveals that yeah, that broke back in February or so. Crickets from the Plex team.

I downgraded to an earlier version that should work. At least it tries, but it throws a postprocessing error. More searching, and I find out that this is a well known, intermittent issue. And nobody has concluded why or what the fix would be.

Plex works great to store and serve movies and TV shows. The DVR is apparently v0.2alpha at best. It works, but don't count on it.

Oh--and I'm not sure where they get their metadata, but my trial recordings this morning of a couple of old Magnum PI shows from the 80s are showing up with the new 2018 metadata.

[garyan2]

This has always been my impression too. Plex moved over to using Rovi last year, so no surprise on your observations.

I would suggest checking out emby. It is much better, reliable, and uses Gracenote. Emby has been my primary DVR for about a 1-1/2 years and I have only missed 1 recording, not due to emby... it was my fault. The only time I look at my backup DVRs is to delete recordings I already watched through emby.

I don't believe you're going to get commercial skipping, though.

[adam1991]

Funny you should say that. Just this morning I was looking at Emby, and considering moving wholesale. I'm not all that into the Plex world that I couldn't simply switch over.

It does look like commercial skipping is not intended to be very integrated, although Emby appears to have a mechanism to pass the shows on for post processing. How well comskip works in that, I haven't gotten that far.

I'm doing this on a Synology NAS (a good one, 1019+, Intel) so maybe that limits me a bit. I could always repurpose my WMC rig for Emby DVR if it came to that, and leave the NAS to serve the non-DVR stuff.

Then again, maybe it's time to give up on commercial skipping. Really, I need the DVR *only* for the primetime stuff that Hulu doesn't serve up the next day. That means CBS, as well as The Blacklist. Maybe a few other things, but Hulu is doing so much now--and I have the ad-free version--that my DVR use has gone way down.

[Sharks]

Hello Adam,

I've also got Plex/Plexpass but their recent decisions ripping out functionality, adding cloud based integrations, & user data management doesn't bode well for Plex's future. : (
I would also suggest you take a look at Jellyfin.

Thanks,
-Sharks

[garyan2]

Jellyfin is a snapshot in time of what emby was before they went closed-source. I already had a lifetime for emby, so never took a look at Jellyfin. I don't know how active the development community is, I assume they are active, but I don't know how it compares to emby nowadays. Their Live TV however is enabled and it is free... you just need to supply your own guide.

Even when Jellyfin came to be, without any changes, it was superior to what Plex is today in my opinion.

[Sharks]

Haha yeah, I knew it was a snapshot of EMBY before it went closed-source and figured it deserved at least a mention before purchasing an EMBY license as the development community seems quite active and I've had reasonably good luck with it. I'm still working on my full conversion over. This is due to Plex agents being a little more refined than Jellyfin's for finding naming schemes that don't 100% conform to what it is looking for. I also have some family that I'll need to swap over as well and that will be a bit more of challenge than I'm currently looking to take on. I'm using my schedules direct account for Guide data in Jellyfin seems to work well, and has great integration with ServerWMC as well. : )

[garyan2]

Then again, maybe it's time to give up on commercial skipping. Really, I need the DVR *only* for the primetime stuff that Hulu doesn't serve up the next day. That means CBS, as well as The Blacklist. Maybe a few other things, but Hulu is doing so much now--and I have the ad-free version--that my DVR use has gone way down.

I just realized, you not being familiar with emby, that even without commercial skipping they have a mechanism that makes it easy without modifying the captured stream or external processing. While watching, if you long-hold and tap the right arrow you will see the track bar with a frame capture of that position. Makes it easy to see whether it is a commercial or the program at that time. Just scan through and skip the commercials that way. These images are built on a scheduled task, so I watch all my recordings the day after to get this benefit.

[adam1991]

it just goes to show, there's more than one way to skin a cat.

[jachin99]

I know at least a few people over there use MCEBuddy also. I use it to cut commercials completely out. I have two separate libraries for shows I take commercials out of. Library one is called recordings, and it is created natively in emby when a show is recorded. Library two is called TV shows, and MCE buddy moves the copy of the show with no commercials to a folder included in my TV Shows Library. This way I can go back to a an original copy of a show if anything every goes wrong during the cut. I'm also using the donator's version of comskip, and I have never had a show get cut off like this to my knowledge.

[adam1991]

OK Gary, there's really no reason not to try Emby. So tell me, how relevant is this article today:

https://www.techhive.com/article/320060 ... utter.html

I imagine things have changed a decent amount.

One thing that caught my eye was this:

and Emby seemed to categorize all recorded programs–including movies–as “TV.”

Frankly, that one threw me when I set up Plex DVR and it wouldn't let me record a movie until I had set up a folder specifically for movies, never mind that I already set up a folder for TV. That makes no sense to me, because if I'm recording stuff, it's all TV to me. Just like how WMC does it. So Emby's handling of it in this manner is actually a good thing to me. Is it still that way?

Also:

There’s no easy way, for instance, to start watching a program from the point at which you left off

hmmmm, that sounds odd. So if I hit the stop button and go back and then return, I'm on my own with regard to finding the spot where I left off?? Is that still current?

Also, will my current Schedules Direct subscription work to get Emby guide data (I'll be running both WMC and Emby simultaneously, so that means two sessions a day--and maybe using two different protocols)? And how good is that guide data and its presentation? The only reason I ask is, if I moved wholesale to Emby then I wouldn't have anything to run EPG123 on (Macintosh computers only in the house, except for the WMC machine--and Emby would be running on my NAS).

Thanks.

[garyan2]

Emby has come a long way since 2017 for live/recorded TV. I've watched their progress since the beginning in 2015, and it wasn't until the fall premieres of 2018 that I was comfortable enough to move my DVR operations over to them.

The TV/Movie storage location is configurable now. You can have it all saved in the same place, or have TV in one place and Movies in another. I never record movies OTA, so never been a concern of mine.

There are no problems starting a recorded show where you left off. Emby tracks your progress.

Your Schedules Direct subscription will still work with emby, but that will go away in the future. I am actually surprised it is still there as an option. With your premier membership though, you can get your guide listings straight from Gracenote. From a guide quality standpoint, if you were to compare the 3 options of Schedules Direct, EPG123 XMLTV, and Emby Guide Data (Gracenote), they will look nearly identical. Gracenote edges ahead in my opinion just for having more current series images, and I believe sports images will show graphics of the opposing teams.

[adam1991]

Thanks, Gary. I will play with this today and get it set up. I've already removed the Plex DVR and libraries.

Hey, it's only five bucks to try.

[adam1991]

Well, color me impatient. I tried for a few hours, and gave up on Emby.

I see the advantages, and why you like it. But I got driven down too many rabbit holes for this and that, and the overall Emby Connect UX is twisted around enough (especially compared to Plex), it all makes a new user like me wonder if the programmers ever got any advice from the outside world.

But overall, those few hours gave me the impression that while Emby may have some advantages over Plex, it also has its own disadvantages and unappealing quirks. Overall, I'd say the two are equivalent with respect to and scope of numbers of pluses and minuses.

Right now, I've uninstalled both Emby and Plex from my NAS. Maybe I'll go back and play later.

[garyan2]

Yah, the emby connect is, well, just weird. I don't even use it... I am fortunate to have a free DNS registration to my WHS2011 server and just call directly to it from outside the network. At home, just use the server IP address and port 8096.

[adam1991]

Another thing: I went in to record a show, and said to record the series. But when I hit the gear to set series recording settings, it did absolutely nothing. I could move over and hit the gear to set that particular show's record settings, but nothing I did could get Emby to let me set the settings for the entire series.

On the other hand, the first thing I did was click on the channel number itself in the guide--and I got the lovely scrolling list of all upcoming programming just for that channel. So someone's paying attention...

[garyan2]

I just tried a series recording of a random show, and at fist I didn't get anything either with the gear either. I clicked the [Series] hotspot on the top, selected the series there (not the ... to cancel it), and it let me edit it just fine. When I went back to the guide and selected the same series the gear worked. Don't know if emby had to do some processing before making the gear work, or just need to refresh the page.

Here are the options you should (eventually) see.

[adam1991]

so, a secret dance.

If you want me to do the dance, don't make it secret. At least, don't put a non-functioning button in the UI to fool me and to make it look like "yeah, well, this feature doesn't actually work".

There was also a bugaboo regarding favorite TV stations in the guide. It's a bad implementation, made worse by the fact that the setting for "show only favorite stations" ended up showing me NO stations. I had to turn that off in order to see anything. The best I could do was group my favorites at the top of the list.

Anyway, I guess I wasn't in the mood to search out all the myriad secret dances of yet another system that, in the end, would still be full of compromises (just a different set of them than Plex).

But it's definitely on my radar regardless. At least it did seem to do my movies and TV shows well, with absolutely no need to change anything on my end.

[jachin99]

Emby connect is kind of weird, and it took me a minute to get my head wrapped around it. Which client are you using? Are you using the Web app, or Emby Theater? I know there are some issues with the guide that have been fixed in a beta version of the server. If you want to transition from WMC to Emby at an easier pace, then maybe setup Emby Server, and download the WMC client app. This way you can see your emby content in the WMC interface. If you do this be sure to download the BETA WMC client, not the release version as it wont work as well with newer versions of Emby Server. It took me a little while to get used to Emby because it is so different from WMC but once you understand it then it is really simple.

[adam1991]

I expect that's the case with most things.

For example, I thought I'd also give Channels DVR a try. While it's not quite the number or depth of rabbit holes, it still has its...quirks.

I don't think I'll go back to Plex. I'll see how Channels works out with a few recordings.

One thing it doesn't do: let me click on the channel and show me a scrolling list of the next 2 weeks of programs on that channel. Emby and WMC do that.

Also, it doesn't really allow for customizing comskip (on my Synology NAS). Not really. Plex did that, with an explicit data directory outside the (hidden) install directory.

But, at least it doesn't cut commercials. It merely marks them, a la my WMC. Even if Plex commercial skip worked, which it doesn't, it does so by cutting them out. Bad Idea jeans.

[tonywagner]

It takes more up-front setup, but I am enjoying TVHeadend running on a Raspberry Pi 4, accessed by a web UI and Kodi clients. Comskip is working well with it, and the web interface can list upcoming programs in variety of ways.