I hope you have better luck than I did. Don’t get me wrong, I love Plex and right now my workflow is to record using my Tablos and then rip the recordings to my Plex server for viewing and archiving. I haven’t had any problems with my Tablos. I am a Plex Premium subscriber too and gave Plex DVR a good couple of months try (quit trying February). I eventually gave up. I had a few problems with it:
- Missed recordings. Lots of them and most annoying for me was that the recordings would fail and then completely disappear. Meaning that while Plex DVR was supposed to leave the failed recordings in the listings, it didn’t. This was a problem that cropped up in the last beta released I used. This meant that I had to constantly check that shows were actually showing this week and then check that they recorded.
- If you’re going to use a HDHR Extend for recording because it has a x264 transcoder built-in and will let you transcode the broadcast MPEG-2 to x264 in real-time, good luck with that. You either get pretty good transcoding (“Heavy”) that is not deinterlaced or you get heavily compressed transcoding (“Mobile”) that is deinterlaced. This is a thread about it. If you didn’t get the HDHR Extend, then all your recordings will be MPEG-2 and you will either have to transcode the using a post-processing script (a pain to get working in Plex) or transcode on-the-fly.
- Plex DVR does not check HDHR tuners before recording and since Plex doesn’t let one watch live TV, you’ll end up using another app to do that. The problem here is that Plex DVR predetermines which tuner it is going to use in an HDHR box when the recording is scheduled. If someone in your household decides to watch live TV using the HDHR and uses that tuner – and is continuing to use that tuner when your recording starts, the recording will fail. Plex does not bother to try the other tuner even if it is free.
The benefit of Plex DVR and HDHR is that Dolby Digital surround is passed through and recorded. That is awesome.
Oh, when you do record, don’t do the remux-on-the-fly option. Any glitch in the broadcast will throw the video and audio out of whack. I ended up recording only to TS files.
Hope you have better luck, let us know how it goes.