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Hey guys. I'm going to be transitioning my parents over to Plex Live TV for antenna-based OTA content, and I was hoping to use a Pi3 as the DVR. Being aware that a Pi3 would be underpowered, I ordered the "Extend" model by HDHomerun, which has built-in hardware transcoding to H.264, and should completely relieve the Pi3 of that duty (hopefully).

Thoughts? Might the Pi3 still be underpowered, even if not transcoding? I've never used Plex in any meaningful capacity, nor have I used their new Live TV service. They'll be using Rokus for playback (2 TVs total).

https://www.tivo.com/
There's your target.

Plex isn't exactly natively available for ARM, what people did for the Pi is use one of the NAS releases and hack it.

And audio and subtitles can result in you transcoding more than you might expect.

Glorious wrote:

Plex isn't exactly natively available for ARM, what people did for the Pi is use one of the NAS releases and hack it.

And audio and subtitles can result in you transcoding more than you might expect.

I was assuming the HDHomerun unit would also handle any audio conversion, but honestly hadn't given that aspect much thought. Seeing Plex Server available for NAS units was part of what made me hopeful that a Pi3 would suffice, especially with the transcoding already being done. I honestly don't know, as I've heard that everything going through a single USB link is a bit of a sore spot for the Pi.

My folks do have a moderately capable desktop PC just a few feet away, but I was hoping to keep all the TV/DVR functionality separate from their PC experience (they already have enough trouble as it is), and the power usage fairly low.

I use a cheap tivo roamio OTA to handle all the dvr duties. It works well, and has no issues. I also use Plex for my media serving. Its a PITA. I wish I could go bcak to my Win7 WMC box.

I at one point thought about the same thing. Even without transcoding the NIC is a major bottle neck. At 100Mbps it just can't just and serve the data fast enough.

DragonDaddyBear wrote:

I at one point thought about the same thing. Even without transcoding the NIC is a major bottle neck. At 100Mbps it just can't just and serve the data fast enough.

Being 100mbit shouldn't be an issue in and of itself, as this will be 720p and already compressed (probably under 5mbit per stream, and certainly no more than 10). As mentioned earlier though, I believe the NIC shares a link with the USB ports, so it could very well be a problem if the external USB HDD saturates most of that link and leaves nothing for the NIC.

I'll be testing using my own Pi3 and Roku once I receive the HDHomerun, so I'll let everyone know how it goes (or if I need help with setup).

I think it'll work mostly ok, the problem is that more things than you might expect bump you out of direct play and into transcoding, in which event it likely won't work OK.

I can't remember the compatibility list that well, but audio (like AC3) and subtitles (like SDH) are typical problem children.