Very cool. Any plans to take this much further?
Would love to be able to use channels transcoder + your HDHR emulation to feed to plex rather than threadfin + ffmpeg commands.
Would be cool to be able to set a few options/parameters per m3u such as deinterlacer, bitrate, buffer, video/audio codecs and maybe even container?
Jellyfin already supports M3U and XMLTV input same as EMBY.
I currently have my TVE and Pluto channels set up in Plex using Edwin Perez's instructions on xTeVE (just got it working yesterday...Thanks Edwin).
I saw this post and thought maybe I could eliminate the complexity of several different instances of xTeVE and just set up the Channels DVR tuners directly in Plex as per the instructions above.
When I try to add the tuners I get the message "There was a problem adding the device:"
I changed the IP from the local host to the actual IP for the Channels DVR and also tried adding ?format=ts to the end of the hyperlink, all with the same error. Anything else I am missing?
Update to prerelease
While macOS does not ship with wget, most Linux distros do not either. However, you will find (the much more capable) curl in /usr/bin, along with all of the expected BSD userland programs.
Unfortunately that's very doubtful, that feature is exclusive to Channels clients and doesn't work in the web player either.
And just 4 days ago:
Thanks! I will do that.
Virtual Channels are a Channels client feature and do not work anywhere else.
My Channels DVR is out of service due to a disk problem. I installed a Plex server on my Synology NAS a few years ago, but have been using Channels instead. I just updated the Plex server to current release to see how its changed.
Only a few minutes of use but so far I'm impressed. The UI, including the Guide, seems fast and quite responsive. Same with FF, Pause, etc. It almost rivals my Tivos, which have the advantage of a direct connection by HDMI between the screen and the computer (no LAN involved). Of course the Plex UI is quite different from the Channels UI, so I have to climb the learning curve again. The Plex server found my HDHomeRun/antenna and gets live TV through it just as Channels does.
One thing I'm interested in is the reliability of the Plex client app. I've been using Firesticks on several TVs to run the Channels client and it has some problems. E.g., if you try to fast-forward before it's finished the previous click, often the app crashes and restarts.
I may also try out the new "Channels as a Plex Tuner" hack that was just announced.
That didn't work. I've updated both my Plex servers to Beta Version 1.41.3.9232, shut them down, and restarted them.
I still get the same error. I've tried using the entire Channels DVR, the separate TVE DVR source, etc. and still get the same error.
I went to the Plex download site to get the Beta upgrade (since I installed the Beta release from within the program) and it told me I already had the Beta version installed. I've also tried using both the localhost IP and the assigned IP (which is static). Any other things to check?
I'm still having the same issue with the guide data, any further help? thanks
Your DVR has to be running the version listed at the top of this thread.
Sorry, gotcha. New to Channels DVR, but that was a dumb mistake. I ran the "Check for Pre-Release" on the Channels DVR, but that bumped me up to Version 2024.12.04.1929 (running on Win 11 Pro). I'll search around for a way to load the earlier pre-release. Thanks.
Well, I added ?format=ts to the end of my link, and that got it working somewhat. It only brought in 3 TVE channels out of about +35 or so. So, I try deleting it and trying again. Getting closer though.
Any newer prerelease is fine.
When you copy the url from your dvr it should have format=ts&codec=copy
Thank you. It actually did bring over all the TVE channels that I had enabled. The 3 that it showed as available but needing mapped were actually discontinued channels. I'll update the url once I delete and re-add the Channels DVR for TVE in Plex.
I can't say enough about how great this is. It will allow me to get rid of three instances of xTeVe, possibly my 2nd Plex server, and really simplify things. I prefer the Channels DVR interface but I am trying to simplify things for my daughter at college. Again, Thanks for the early Christmas present!
Thank you guys so much for this work - was literally dealing with this right this moment and as far as i can tell this resolves all my issues using an intermediary and just works
Really appreciate the work the Channels team put in to bring us this feature.
Did want to ask, is anyone else experiencing transcoding issues on HLS streams through Plex? All I get a is a black screen a bunch of transcoding errors. However playing original quality works. I do have the aac decoder that @tmm1 mentioned above, so I am not sure what else it could be.
Is there anyway to use a custom channels list as the source for a m3u export like this one for plex? i have something like over 1000 channels inserted into channels but i use about 1-200
Easiest way now, may be to just go through the listing in PLEX and hide/remove all the ones you don't use.
