There's this great free resource out there that many people
aren't taking advantage of. It's something that most homes can access
absolutely free, and that's over the air TV. Now I know what you're thinking. What year is this? I know, I know. It sounds odd talking about over the air
TV this day and age, but I found a way to modernize it and make it more accessible
with a little bit of hardware and a little bit of software from Plex.
I've been using Plex for almost ten years, and one of the features
that isn't talked about that much is one of my favorites,
and that's live TV and DVR. Now, I'm not talking about the free channels that Plex offers,
although we'll be talking about those a little bit later,
I'm talking about over the air channels like ABC, NBC, PBS and many others
to watch sports, local news and more. And with ATSC 3.0 or NextGen TV
rolling out in some areas. You can be sure
you're going to get the clearest broadcast possible
with up to 4K resolution, uncompressed when over the air, versus 1080p compressed
like most TV providers. You also need a few simple things
that I will cover in this video so you can start watching and recording
live TV today.
So full disclosure Plex is a sponsor of this video
and I want to thank them for asking me to share my deep
dive on live TV and DVR with Plex. So with a TV tuner, an antenna,
and a Plex Pass you can turn your media server
into a powerful DVR to record your favorite shows
or watch them live even on the go. You can record any show in your area,
whether that be sports, local news or your favorite TV series
and watch it from any device. Plex has Apps for mobile devices,
smart TVs, gaming consoles, Apple TV and the Web and more. It's hard to find a device
that doesn't support Plex. Watching live TV is as simple as launching
the app and picking a channel. This will stream that channel from
your Plex media server to your device. After live TV starts,
you can pause or even rewind live TV. But if you start watching something
that's currently being recorded, you have the option
to watch from the beginning or watch live. If you choose to watch from the start,
you can skip through commercials and get caught up to the live
broadcast.
This is a little life hack I use to watch something
that's live without the commercials. For something you've already recorded,
there's also this awesome feature that will allow you to skip commercials
or remove them altogether. This is a great time saver and we'll get
this set up today too a little bit later. So one of the best parts of Plex live TV
is you get the best EPG out there. Now EPG stands for Electronic Programming
Guide and it lists all the shows for all channels, along with some additional data
like episode information and more. It's how I know that Jeopardy is on NBC
at 4:30 local time, or that the episode of Nature is a rerun. It's also what helps populate
their powerful search and live TV section. Now, I can't stress enough
how important it is to have a solid EPG when using a DVR.
Without accurate data, you could schedule the wrong show
or miss your show altogether. The EPG is even interactive
on some channels, giving you a picture and a picture guide
while you browse the guide looking for the next thing to watch. And if you only watch
a handful of local channels, you can add channels to your favorites
so you can quickly access them. Plex Live TV lets
you prioritize your recordings so that you don't get in trouble
recording a rerun of Nature instead of the latest episode
of The Bachelor. Don't ask me how I know that. We'll talk more about the EPG,
recording priority, or how not to miss your favorite show
when scheduling your recordings a little bit later. So what do we need in order
to have our very own DVR?
Now, I know this all sounds complicated,
but it's much easier than you think. You'll need a couple of things,
all of which I use in my own home and have been recording TV for years. So you can be sure that this setup
will also work for you. First, we're going to need a Plex server
and a Plex Pass. Next, you'll need a TV tuner
and an antenna. I've used lots of TV tuners in the past,
but the best tuner by far is one from Silicon Dust
and it’s an HDHomerun Flex 4k. This nice little device sits
on your network and converts a TV signal into a video stream so that your Plex
media server can consume it and even change the channels
when requested. This one in particular
has four tuners inside that allows you to watch
or record up to four channels at once. This one also supports the new ATSC
3.0 NextGen TV we talked about a little bit earlier,
so it's future proof. Another important thing
you'll want to have is an antenna that connects to your tuner. Antennas come in all shapes and sizes,
and depending on where you live, you might be able
to get by with a small indoor antenna. If you're in the U.S., there's
this great site out there to help you determine your distance
from the TV towers, which might help
you choose the right antenna. You can visit the site and your location
and see how far away you are from TV towers, their location
and get an estimate of the signal strength to your location
based on this map and information. You can make a better decision
about the antenna you choose, but here's my recommendation
for choosing an antenna: If you're close to the TV towers
and you want something low profile or you live in an apartment or a condo
and can't put an antenna outside, go with this flat antenna,
which is thin, low profile, and can be placed in a window
or even on the wall. This flat antenna from Channel
Master should work great if most TV towers are in the green
or yellow. But if you're further away
from the TV tower or you just want the best reception, I recommend picking up
something like this Antennas Direct antenna
that can be used indoors or outdoors. Now, it's not the best looking antenna, but it has great range
and will work better than a flat antenna if you can hide it or if you aren't concerned
about the aesthetics. Either way, you'll want to mount it
somewhere in your home. The higher the better. Outdoors or an attic will work best now. I got lucky when I moved into this house
because the previous owner installed this massive long range antenna
in the attic and ran coax all the way down to the basement. I got pretty lucky having one in the attic
and above the trees and other houses is one of the best places
for an antenna. So once you have your antenna and tuner,
go ahead and connect your tuner to the network and connect your antenna
to the coaxial terminal. And then finally connect the power
to the tuner. Now, a word of caution. You might be tempted to buy an amplifier,
but I would recommend against it until you truly know that you have a weak
signal. You run the risk of introducing noise
and interference. We'll see this later. And from there you can determine
if you need a signal amplifier or not. So once your tuners on the network, visit
the tuners web page by typing in the IP address in your browser. Here you'll see a landing page
for your device. If you see a message
to update your firmware, I would update it before continuing.
It only takes a minute. And plus,
who doesn't love updating firmware? I do. Once it's updated, you can see the tuner status
and more information about your tuner. Next, we want to see which channels are
tuner can detect. You can do this by going into the channel
lineup and clicking detect channels. This will scan for a list of channels
you can pick up using your antenna. Now, your mileage may vary depending on your area
and how close you are to the TV towers, but it's a good idea to compare
these results to what you'd expect if you weren't seeing the channels
you expect. You might need to adjust your antenna
or think about a signal amplifier. However, I'll show you how to check the
signal strength here in a little bit. One thing you might have noticed is this little plug
that I have connected to my HDHomerun. This is a signal filter that will filter
out LTE and 5G signals from the line. I've noticed that as more cell phone towers go up, the more
they can interfere with my antenna. So I pop this little filter on
to filter out the frequencies. And if you're wondering what interference
looks like, it's this weird pixelated blocking
that you sometimes see when watching TV. Now, this filter
isn't going to magically make channels appear out of nowhere or boost
the signal. It's there to just take away
noise created by the towers. Once we've got our tuner
all set up, make note of the IP address because we'll need this later
for configuring Plex.
So now that we have our TV tuner and antenna set up,
we can now configure this in Plex. You'll need to sign in to your Plex
media server and then go into settings in the manage section. You should see live TV and DVR. Here, you'll want to configure a new tuner
when you try to add a new tuner. It will try to search for your tuner and
in most cases it will find your device. But if it doesn't, you can manually add your device
by typing in the IP address of your tuner. Once it's added, you'll need to set
a few settings for Plex. Here you should choose the antenna
your home country and your postcode. The postal code is needed
to download the EPG. Once you've set this, you will then
see a list of channels we found earlier. You can scan again or even remove
channels. However, I wouldn't remove channels here. I would create favorites later
that we're going to set up. If you're happy with this list,
click continue. Plex will start to download
the latest guide and after a few minutes you should see all of the TV shows
that are available. The channel guide can be found
in the live TV section. Here we can see a list of all the shows
we can record and watch. This will look different depending on the client you're using,
but the experience is mostly the same. The live TV feature
is pretty self-explanatory. We can scroll through the channels
and when we see something we want to watch, we just click on it.
This will start a live stream. From there, you could even pause
or rewind a live TV show. Pretty cool. So you can see that I have a pretty good
signal and the quality's really good. But what do you do if you don't have
the greatest picture quality? Well, earlier I mentioned that we could
check our signal strength for a broadcast to determine
if we need to adjust our antenna or think about a signal booster.
This might work differently depending on your tuner,
but if you're using a Silicon Dust tuner, like I'm using, the easiest way
that I found to do this is to start a live show and then go to our tuners
homepage while the show is playing. Once you're going to tuner status
and choose the tuner that's currently being used,
which you can see in the summary. Click on the tuner that is in use and here
you can see the status. The most important stat
here is signal quality. The higher the better. Now, if this is noticeably low
and your TV stream isn't the greatest, you can try adding a signal booster
or a line filter to try to clean it up. I will have links to this
and all the other hardware we talked about in the video description.
So back to recording for the channel guide. After selecting a show,
if you want to record a show, all you have to do is click
the record button. From here, you can choose whether or not
you want to record new airings, only new and repeat
and which library you want to save to. Now, you might have noticed
that I have multiple libraries, TV shows and recorded TV. That's
because I wanted to separate the two. But it's totally up to you. It's as simple as creating a new library
and setting the type to TV shows. Then you'll see this option
when scheduling recordings. You also have some additional settings
in show advanced, but we won't change them here. We'll apply these settings
to all recorded TV here in a little bit. After your clicking record,
we can now see that we have a record icon on the show letting us know
that it's currently being recorded. You also have lots of quick actions
when hovering or clicking on shows where you can schedule a recording
or even cancel recordings. Pretty handy. One thing you might have noticed are the categories across the top now.
Most of these are self-explanatory. However, there's one named Plex channels
that's different from the rest of the TV channels. These are FAST channels
or free ad supported streaming television. It's streaming TV
that can be watched at any time. They aren't channels
that you can find over the air from your local TV stations,
but channels that stream content. 24/7.
Like, for instance,
if you want to binge watch Top Gear or The Price Is Right
Classics, there's a channel for that. But back to recording TV, once the show is
recorded, it will be in your library. You set for recorded TV. The default is TV shows. Once here you'll see a similar experience
that we see for movies. You'll have a recommended section,
a library section, and a categories section
and view controls for your media. Clicking on a show
will bring you to that show, and from there you can see
all the recorded seasons for that show. And if you want to get to your show, you click on the season
to get to your episodes. Once you are on your episode,
you can see more details about it, like the date it aired,
how long the recording is, the rating, and even details about the episode.
You can also switch the track to another language and choose subtitles
if the broadcast supports it. After clicking play, the video will start and you can watch it
as you normally would. One of the best features that comes
with live TV and DVR is intro, skip and commercial Skip. If enabled Plex can detect intros,
commercials and even credits to help you watch more TV without interruptions.
When playing a show where an intro is detected, you will see
a skip intro button in the bottom right corner that you can click on
and it will skip right to the show. This also works for commercials too. When in commercial break starts,
you will see a button to skip ads, which if you click on it, will skip
right back to where the show picks back up. Now, it's not perfect,
but I will say it's pretty close for the shows that I watch. It's not enabled by default,
so let's enable it. We can do this in our library settings,
which you can find in the manage section if we edit our recorded TV library
and go to advanced. We should see a few settings here
that help us skip unwanted content, be sure that enable intro detection and
enable credits detection is turned on. And then for the ads detection setting,
you want to choose For Recorded Items. This enables ad detection
for new recordings. Now, if you've already recorded TV
with Plex or another TV, you can turn it on for all items to force
a scan of all items in that folder. Awesome. So once that's turned on
and should now add these markers so we can skip unwanted content.
Now this detection does take a few minutes and only starts
after a show is done recording. And another tip, you won't see recordings in your library
until it's done doing the detection. But after that, now we can skip through
all of the unwanted content and watch TV like a pro like this show
right here. If we start playing it,
we can see it detects the intro and we can skip through it
if we like. And then once we get to a commercial
break, it will prompt us to skip that too, if we like. And then if it detects credits,
it will do the same. Now there are some additional settings you can choose for skipping commercials,
like removing them altogether. This is in the DVR settings
where we can set our defaults for all new recordings.
In the detect
commercial setting, you could choose from disabled detect
marked for skip or delete. Now, I would recommend setting this
to detect in for skip rather than setting it to detect and delete
because deleting is a destructive action. And while Plex commercial skip
is really good at detecting commercials, it's a lot safer to just add markers than
accidentally delete part of your show. As for the rest of the settings here,
I've only adjusted a few. I set the resolution to prefer HD. I don't replace lower resolution items
and I do allow partial airings and I don't adjust
the minutes before and after. The recording shows are pretty good
at starting and ending on time. But if you find
you want to record a minute or two after, just adjust this setting here
live broadcasts that go over the scheduled time, like sports might be a good reason
to add some padding at the end of this recording so you don't miss overtime.
Also, I enable a refresh on the guide data during the maintenance window
and for me that's 2 a.m.. So now that we have scheduled recordings,
how do we make sure that my reruns of Nature and Nova don't get scheduled
instead of my wife’s show The Bachelor. You only make that mistake once. We can do this easily
by adjusting our recording priority. If we go back to the live TV area
and choose the DVR schedule, we can see everything
that's scheduled to record. And on this far right,
we can see the recording priority. This is where we can drag and drop
to reorder our shows with the highest priority
being at the top. This helps
when there are scheduling conflicts due to the tuners being in use
when recording or watching live TV. Now I have four tuners
so I rarely have a conflict, but if I did, this is how I would choose
to prioritize one recording over another. Let's say, for instance, I wanted to get
in trouble again and prioritized nature over the Bachelor and Survivor
or even Big Brother. I would just drag nature above
all the other shows like this. This would ensure that if there ever
was a conflict or not enough free tuners, nature would record
instead of all of these shows. Okay, let's move that back
before I get in trouble again. Now that we have everything set up,
there's also this small feature to make your life a little bit easier
when channel surfing, and that's favorites. As you can see
from my list of local channels, I have a lot of channels that I almost
never watch, but at the same time don't want to remove them
from my channel lineup. This is where favorites come in handy. I like to add all the channels I watch to my favorites list
so I can easily browse them
when I'm looking for something to watch. You can even add some of the Plex FAST
channels to your favorites too. I really like the BBC, Earth
Channel, PBS, Nature and the Modern Marvis Channel,
and I've added those to my favorites too. They have over 600 to choose from,
so there's no shortage of content there. Now, if I switch back to my favorites,
I can see a quick list of my favorite channels without skipping around through all the channels
I really watch.
Now, just because I did all of this from a browser and a TV
doesn't mean you have to do it here too. Plex's mobile app works
great for watching live TV, previously recorded TV
and even scheduling recordings. There have been so many times
where my wife and I are out and about and hear about a new show
that's airing soon, and now it's second nature to immediately
schedule it to record. I just open up the app, go to live
TV, search for the show and schedule the recording. It's super simple and convenient
to do for mobile, so that's everything you need to get started today to record
live TV like a pro. I've been using the setup
with Plex for years and it's everything I could want
in a DVR system from high quality over the air, uncompressed video and audio
to an accurate EPG to how easy it is to schedule recordings
from anywhere on any device to commercial skipping and so much more.
I want to thank Plex again for sponsoring this video
and you all for watching. Well,
I've learned a ton about live TV antennas, network tuners and Plex,
and I hope you learned something too. And remember,
if you found anything in this video helpful,
don't forget to like and subscribe. Thanks for watching.
