hey everybody it's Lon Seidman and we are back with our monthly sponsored video
from Plex and we've got it running right now on a Roku and that is because it now
supports live TV watching through the DVR feature that we've covered a number
of times in the past but this time we're gonna be looking at the lowest end Roku
device the $29 Roku Express to see how this might work as a secondary TV
viewing option if you're building out your Plex based cord-cutting solution
we're gonna be taking a look at that in just a second but I do want to let you
know in the interest of full disclosure that this is a paid sponsorship from
Plex however nobody is reviewing this content before it is uploaded and all
the opinions you're about to hear are my own so let's dig into this and see how
this works now if you haven't seen my Plex DVR overview video I do suggest you
check that out first because I detail how to set it up and how it works in a
nutshell what happens is your plex server connects up with a digital
television tuner and can pull over the air content into your plex server or if
you have a cable based tuner like the HD homerun prime that I use you can connect
it up with your cable service also there are some limitations to that which I'll
talk about in that DVR overview video and in full disclosure silicon dust who
makes the HD homerun is an occasional sponsor here on the channel
now when you load up your Roku now and you have a Plex pass subscription and
you've got that DVR configured you'll see a new option on your menu here for a
program guide so we're going to click on that real quick and what I'm presented
with is everything that is on television right now I can tune to for example The
Weather Channel here through my cable system and it will get up and running it
it does take a little bit longer on this particular roku to get up then I saw on
the Roku streaming stick plus I tested the other day and that's because this is
$29 and kind of their entry-level low-end device but the video looks great
I'm gonna show you one thing that I think you should do to make the video
look a little better in a second but I've been very pleased with how the
video looks for a low-cost device here and all seems to be functioning quite
well I also found that I did not have any interlacing issues which is
something we ran into with the Amazon fire TV stick that usually cost about
$29 or so it was not deinterlacing the video but it looks like the
roku stick here is doing that successfully so you do get a little bit
of artifacts when the video first comes up but you're not going to see those
interlacing lines that you might see on the Amazon device so for a low cost
tuner this does seem to be working pretty well and sometimes you will see a
little more compression artifacts depending on what you're using for your
plex server to encode I do have a hardware encoder on my NAS device that
sometimes muddies up the image here a little bit part of the problem too is
that my cable provider Comcast really compresses the heck out of everything
before they even send it over to me in the first place so I'm dealing with a
lot of issues with artifacts occasionally on here but your mileage
might vary and if you're using an over-the-air antenna you're going to get
a much better signal coming in so I think you'll see less artifacts then you
just saw with that video there but one thing I do suggest you do is that you go
up to the top of the menu here and you go over to the settings which you'll
find under your username and in there there's going to be some options for
video and what I've done is I've moved the local quality from its default of 12
megabits per second to 20 megabits per second it was working just fine even on
this low-end roku and I suggest you go in that direction just because it does
improve the video quality a little bit and you'll see less artifacts in the
process there now compared to some of the other platforms that support the
Plex DVR the Roku is a little more limited with the live TV and that you
can't set up recordings from it you have to do it from your phone or from other
platforms that do support that DVR function but you do get time shifting
while you're watching live television so I've got the weather channel here paused
on a commercial I can hit play now and it will start playing back and then if I
go up here with the remote here you can see that I just selected this little bar
here I can then fast-forward further along here in the broadcast and then hit
play now this will go away after I changed the channel but I can now again
pause it and maybe rewind a little bit too to where I was before so I can go
back here and go over to play and go from there so it will do some of the live
time shifting but again you're limited on DVR features but once your DVR is
done recording a show in its entirety that will of course show up in your Plex
library and you can play it back on the Roku here like you would any other Plex
recording now what other cool thing you can do with the Roku Express is hook it
up to an old CRT TV like my dusty old one here and I've
got live TV coming in from my plex server right now this is an HD broadcast
of course getting significantly downsampled for the TV here but it seems
to work pretty well you do need the Express Plus version of their low-end
device this costs $39 vs. 29 but the differentiator here with the plus is
that it has composite output so if you've got an old TV out in your garage
or something you can hook this up to that and get your full plex server the
live TV of course works here but you can also back out here and navigate through
other stuff as well so I can go into my DVR recordings for example and play back
something that was recorded earlier on my DVR so I can hit play here and play
back something from Plex as you can see Plex is working just like it does on a
larger television here let's take a second for it to spin up again on this
lower end device but once it's up and running you can start watching your
recordings on this - and it seems to be working pretty nicely that's gonna do it
for Roku and live TV on Plex it seems to be working quite nicely even on a CRT
television do keep your suggestions coming in for a future Plex
topics I'm always looking for new things to talk about with this because it is a
part of my cord cutting solution and I am going to be working on a video soon
with a kind of a synopsis of how I have everything configured right now because
at the moment I was looking on my time timeline here we have about talked about
two or three hours worth of content on this most recent project and I want to
get something a little more concise so I'll detail exactly what I've got hooked
up from hardware to software and everything in between that video will be
coming up soon if you have questions for that video please also leave them down
in the comment section this is Lon Seidman thanks for watching this channel is
brought to you by my patreon supporters including gold-level supporters the
black eyed and blues music hour podcast Chris Allegretta
and Kalyan Kumar
if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a
month
head over to Lon.TV/patreon to learn more
and don't forget to subscribe visit Lon.TV/s