Why it is not possible to serve directly links from playlist.m3u to Plex DVR?

[petrmenzel]

I would like to understand how does it all work. There are: playlist.m3u, (real/virtual) TV tuner, Plex DVR. Why I cannot serve directly links of streams from playlist.m3u to Plex DVR? What is format supported by the Plex DVR to be playable? Is another purpose of the virtual TV tuner than convert "text" of the playlist.m3u to "text" readable for the Plex DVR? So all should works as only changing text?

Thx you very much for explanation. There is nothing on the web about Plex DVR in deeper form to learn.

[hazcod]

Plex does not accept .TS files, only the MPEG streams we can decode from it.

[tombowditch]

Plex does accept TS files and is accepting the direct URLs I'm shoving at it. Wrote a quick proxy yesterday.

[hazcod]

Does it? Hm, then my project is a lot more complex than it needs to be.
I'm looking at your https://github.com/tombowditch/telly

[tombowditch]

Yep, wrote that yesterday in an hour or two and works perfectly, there's a few quirks I need to fix but it drops all the overheads and just shoves Plex the .TS URLs from .

[hazcod]

@tombowditch The video in your m3u is MPEGTS, right? I'm getting a 'cannot tune to channel' with telly aswel.
Plex: DEBUG - DVR:Grabber: Operation for Live TV - Session completed with status error (The device does not tune the required channel)

EDIT: apparently it depends what EPG provider I pick

[petrmenzel]

It is strange. How can affect EPG the playback?

But telly does not work for me too. My conclusion is that muxy and telly do not work but muxy seem to be more stable. The telly TV tuner is telling like the tvhProxy that Device not found. Ensure your device is powered on and connected to your network. although it is running.

With the telly the error was Unable to tune channel (Time out).

Tell me someone please how to recognize that plex is able to play directly stream provided from my ISP? Is it true that all stream playable by VLC should be playable by Plex? My stream looks like this:

#EXTINF:0,ČT1
http://media.kuki.cz:8116/ct1hd/stream.m3u8?type=live&sign=XxXxXxXxX&expires=1111111111

The sign and expires is changed every 24 hours. The link perfectly play in the VLC.

Thx you very much. I think that is important to tell what is the format supported by the Plex to know what is needed to do.

[petrmenzel]

• Plex is probably able to playback MPEG-2 natively (What is Plex DVR readable format?).
• Every IPTV is usually MPEG2, MPEG4 stream format. (IPTV by Chris Woodford. Last updated: January 4, 2018.)
• Stream .ts is only type of the MPEG2 so Plex should be able to play .ts to natively. (What are MPEG-2 TS and MPEG-2 PS?)

So important is to discover what kind of stream is mine, yours and in case that it is MPEG2 we can put this stream directly to the Plex DVR.

[hazcod]

Can confirm, my streams are MPEG2. So problem must be something else.
Did you try changing EPG provider?

[tombowditch]

Hi all, sorry, was at work.

@hazcod the format of my m3u is something like ...

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:-1, tvg-ID="some name" tvg-name="some name" tvg-logo="some name" group-title="some name",some name
http://my.provider/something/something.ts

Running mediainfo on the .ts file shows

Format                                   : MPEG-TS

Plex accepts it just fine, more than happy to invite you to my Plex Home & Server for you to see ^^

[tombowditch]

@petrmenzel

The telly TV tuner is telling like the tvhProxy that Device not found. Ensure your device is powered on and connected to your network. although it is running.

Yeah. Looking into this, seems to not work sometimes but sometimes does work. Right now, for example, it's working perfectly:

Feel free to open an issue over there and I can look into it more.

[petrmenzel]

Now I know my issue and can start to looking for solution.

My stream is MPEG4. So Plex does not support play this.

UPDATE: If the Plex is able to play mpeg4 from .mkv it does not mean that is able to do same thing with mpeg4 stream? (General Media Support)