Plex/Emby as a Sky Q alternative - testing and thoughts

jpaul said:
you mean you encode/re-mux the freeview transport stream dynamically during live recording, or, offload that at some later time ?

are all your clients(smart tv's ? ) able to play the m3u streams too , or they have media boxes ?
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Recordings go to another drive not added to Emby and are than encoded to smaller file size for storage, would just remove ads but family don't watch stuff straight away. I have ffmpeg setup to encode as per category (docs 1080p/720p, daytime stuff 404p ect) . Each client is capable of setting there own timers/recordings so I just check the drive each morning for any new shows someone has recorded the night previously.


DVBViewer already has a list of timers for current series running which automatically record each week.


It would be a lot easier to use the likes of iplayer, itv hub but the quality on some of these catchup services are poor.

My family found some parts confusing on the smart tv so living room has a firestick 4k, 1 bedroom roku 4k stick and another bedroom has a htpc.
 
Rensin said:
Recordings go to another drive not added to Emby and are than encoded to smaller file size for storage, would just remove ads but family don't watch stuff straight away. I have ffmpeg setup to encode as per category (docs 1080p/720p, daytime stuff 404p ect) . Each client is capable of setting there own timers/recordings so I just check the drive each morning for any new shows someone has recorded the night previously.
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interesting, so as you say, recordings not necessarily available immediately - that evening.
do you just losslessly re-mux the sd stuff ? so it goes through a minimum of transforms before getting to the screen;
could expensively use madvrf say and upscale to 1080p and re-encode h264, if you have the horsepower.

Dangerous Dave said:
I still use Emby Theater as I like it's interface but it is becoming a pain having to bodge Media Centre to work in Windows 10.
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I infer Emby Theater relies on media centre
 
jpaul said:
interesting, so as you say, recordings not necessarily available immediately - that evening.
do you just losslessly re-mux the sd stuff ? so it goes through a minimum of transforms before getting to the screen;
could expensively use madvrf say and upscale to 1080p and re-encode h264, if you have the horsepower.
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nope, only I have access to the drive, If they want to watch stuff asap than I'll encode (x264) to either 404p or 540p depending on the show, encoding only takes around 10 mins for a 1 hour show (in SD) so not fussed but most the time they don't watch stuff until the series has completed than binge the series.

or they will just use the Virgin Media box for the sky stuff.
 
I gave up on Sky 10+ years ago and have been a big user of Emby (previously mediabrowser), run Emby Theatre via an Xbox One X as my main media system in the living room and then there's various TVs and devices in the house that also access it.

LiveTV through it wasn't good enough previously so just use the standard freeview tuner through the xbox however with Emby upgrading to version 4 I believe it it has improved Live TV a lot, I have a HDHomeRun TV device on the network so will do some testing with that.

I did the upgrade to 4 yesterday and everything else seems fine and is running even smoother/quicker than before but I still want to stick a small GPU in my home server to handle some of the hardware transcoding when needed (which it seems to do for Live TV streaming).
 
I have been using Emby for many years which and believe it is excellant, but I gave up on trying to get a flawless all in one setup a couple of years back but I am trying to look at it again.

Reading above, has anyone now managed to get live TV and recording into Emby working smoothly like normal freeview on TV does?
 
{{INX}} said:
I have been using Emby for many years which and believe it is excellant, but I gave up on trying to get a flawless all in one setup a couple of years back but I am trying to look at it again.

Reading above, has anyone now managed to get live TV and recording into Emby working smoothly like normal freeview on TV does?
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Nope, when accessing the network HDHomeRun TV via its native app I can change channels instantly as I would on a normal Freeview device but via Emby there is good lag for the channels to load. Tbh I haven't tested enough as the Xbox freeview device works flawlessly however I may have to rethink my setup once the new xbox comes out.
 
I am running Emby through various different client devices (Shield, Fire TV, Web Browers & Emby Theatre) and I still get the same problem as you but when i try the HDHomerun app it is flawelss. Maybe were not quite there yet for an all in one setup :(
 
I've all but given up on trying to use Emby as a replacement for "real" TV equipment. The best I could get was around 10 seconds to tune a channel (and that was with tvheadend locked tuner per mux), the experience just isn't good enough.

Likely the only way it will get improved is if/when Emby gets native tuner support so that the additional layer can be cut out - however given that they only really have 1 main developer, I'm not confident it will be done even in the next 10 years.


For the moment I've swapped my Phone/Broadband provider over and now taken out a Youview package with the couple of premium channels my wife watches, and going to pick up one of the new Freesat boxes that works with my SkyQ LNB, as that will cover a few extra channels and give us more options for recording.
The only thing we'll miss is being able to record something and then watch it in bed, but saving almost £80/month by cancelling SkyQ is a trade off I'm happy to make.
 
Armageus said:
For the moment I've swapped my Phone/Broadband provider over and now taken out a Youview package with the couple of premium channels my wife watches, and going to pick up one of the new Freesat boxes that works with my SkyQ LNB, as that will cover a few extra channels and give us more options for recording.
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Do you have any candidates ?
with the demise of some of the freeview HD channels this week, I'm more in the market for a multi-tuner freeview/sat recorder/dvr
and, not sure Humax provides a reliable upgrade for the ageing 1tuner T2 I have.

youview is still advert ridden - too - no ?
As you say, a quick channel change, currently seems mandatory to me, if you are channel hopping to find something decent,
when netflix/nowtv, say, provide no options (nowtv handed out £1.60/month ent subs during covid - but there is nothing worth watching)
 
jpaul said:
Do you have any candidates ?
with the demise of some of the freeview HD channels this week, I'm more in the market for a multi-tuner freeview/sat recorder/dvr
and, not sure Humax provides a reliable upgrade for the ageing 1tuner T2 I have.
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I received the Plusnet Youview+ box a couple of days ago. It's a Humax T2120 500GB which basically dates from around 2013, so understandably performance is fairly lacking. Primarily we've got this just for access to MTV and TLC that my wife watches - which are premium channels delivered over the internet, and purely for that it will be fine.

I've just ordered the latest Freesat 4K TV box https://www.freesat.co.uk/4k-tv-box/ which by all accounts offers decent performance (as uses a modern quad core processor etc), but is still a bit rough around the edges software wise according to a thread over at AVForums https://www.avforums.com/threads/new-generation-freesat-stb-arris.2256339
I'll update in a couple of days once I've received it and had a play about with it.
I plan on using it as our "Main" box to record most things, leaving the Youview+ box just for the premium channel pack, and have a Roku Premiere to view our Emby or Plex library and any other streaming apps not available on the Freesat box.


If you're happy to be a bit more involved (e.g. installing firmware, spending time configuring/maintaining etc) and don't need inbuilt apps (e.g. iplayer,nowtv etc), then there are Linux based multi-tuner Satellite (and freeview combo) boxes:
https://www.world-of-satellite.co.uk/satellite-and-terrestrial/digital-receivers
https://www.world-of-satellite.com/
The user experience didn't sound good enough to be able to let my wife lose with it however.
 
jpaul said:
Do you have any candidates ?
with the demise of some of the freeview HD channels this week, I'm more in the market for a multi-tuner freeview/sat recorder/dvr
and, not sure Humax provides a reliable upgrade for the ageing 1tuner T2 I have.

youview is still advert ridden - too - no ?
As you say, a quick channel change, currently seems mandatory to me, if you are channel hopping to find something decent,
when netflix/nowtv, say, provide no options (nowtv handed out £1.60/month ent subs during covid - but there is nothing worth watching)
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Demise of what freeview HD channels? Are some being removed or something?

We use a second hand BT Youview box (500GB) as our main box and I don't see any advertising on it at all. All the BT services have been removed as we aren't a BT customer but you do have apps for thing like Now TV, Prime, Netflix, Iplayer etc

Sure the box is a bit sluggish but I still think its one of the best freeview solutions available.

I also tried watching live tv on my shield through plex again and it has been improved quite a bit. Seems a lot faster switching channels and the guide has been worked on, still not good enough for family use but I could probably make do with it if it were just me.
 
Puzzled said:
Well that sucks, should be adding more HD channels not removing them. Get rid of the pointless SD channels where the quality is so bad you don't want to watch them anyway.
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They removed 2 HD channels of which one was a +1.

Hardly a huge loss I've never even heard of tjc.

I wish they would get rid of all +1 channels.
 
Oh yeah! i forgot all about this!

Ok, so i ended up getting a HDHR again as i suspected it was my network that was causing the pixels - low and behold, it was. At that current time we used plex, but i found that after every guide refresh, it would break my library and i'd have to restore it, so i gave up on that. Then i tried the Channels app from https://getchannels.com/ .This works like a charm, the downside of Channels is you have to pay around £8 per month for dvr, but you can record direct from the ATV, i have mine saving my files onto my NAS with will than port all recordings into plex, its worked pretty flawless for me. So we use an apple tv, have Channels, plex, now tv, all catch up, netflix and prime. You can even use iptv too if you so wish. We dont miss sky at all and best of all, its girlfriend friendly!
 
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