Last night was one of those nights where I had the desire to play something, but lacked the energy to actually make it happen. As a result this morning I thought I would talk a bit about one of my “weird shit bel does” side projects. Now some backstory… I have been an avid user of Plex for well over a decade and have been a Plex Pass holder for almost as long as that program existed. For the uninitiated, Plex is a home media server that just keeps getting more useful and acts as a unifying force to glue all of your personal media together in a single app. Thanks to Plex Pass I have access to all of my home media securely and remotely no matter where I happen to be. I don’t even have a bluray or dvd player in my home entertainment set up, and instead rip the media directly to my network attached storage where the Plex server picks it up. There is a constant theme in my life that I hate fiddling with discs… and in truth that is a large reason why I have been digital only with purchases for the last few console generations and the last PC game I purchased in physical form was TERA in 2011.
In 2016 Plex added the ability to record over the air television with its own built in DVR functionality. I’ve always been curious about this but never jumped through the hoops in order to get it up and running. Our house has been wired for cable the entire time it has existed, and as such never had a proper high gain antenna. So essentially in order to make this work you need a television capture device and an antenna, two things I did not have readily available. I am not exactly sure what put this idea in my head, but over the last few months I have conspired to make this happen and play with it. I think in part it was when I set my parents television up with a new digital antenna and seeing just how many channels existed, and how shockingly clear the picture quality was. One of the things that I do not love about cable DVR systems is that I can’t save that file off to network storage. Plex effectively fills in that gap allowing me to record any shows I care about from broadcast television.
Now when it comes to acquiring a solution to record over the air television, you can quickly spend a lot of money. If you followed the recommended path, you would end up spending upwards of $300 to get the set up running. Instead I did a modicum of research and tried to do it on the cheap. Essentially I did not want to shell out much money without knowing if the process was going to work. This meant going to ebay and trying to find the best bang for my buck. In total I spent about $40 on the set up I have now, and the end result is shockingly good. The first piece of this equation was the capture card and for that I went with the Hauppage WinTV-HVR 950Q. It is capable of receiving a full 1080i signal and has fully supported Windows 10 drivers. The negative however is that it only has a single tuner, which means like early DVR boxes you can only be recording a single show at a time.
As far as the Antenna, after some research I decided to go with this design the Antennas Direct ClearStream Eclipse Amplified Multi-directional TV Antenna. There are three or four common designs for indoor antennas and based on reading and watching review videos I landed on this one because it seemed the most consistent. I currently have this mounted on my office wall using four small 3M Command Adhesive tabs rather than the permanent mounting medium that was provided. The truth is I hooked everything up, installed the Windows 10 drivers for the capture device, and Plex immediately recognized it.
In the Plex interface I provided the zip code that I live in, and it auto retrieved the channel guide information for all of the channels I was capable of picking up. You can go into the interface and determine which channels you care about, for example I am not listing the shocking number of random Christian broadcasting channels. I probably should make another culling pass because I believe I have some shopping channel as well that is still in the mix. From here you have the option of a grid like shown above, or a show by show based interface showing what is on within the next few hours.
For the moment I am using it to record the handful of network shows that I care about. For example this is a recording from the CBS show Ghosts, and demonstrates the quality of the broadcast. One word of warning however about this sort of set up is by default the file that is generated is massive. The stream is encoded as MPEG-2 compressed audio and video and stored in a TS file. This relatively low level of compression means that an hour of television ends up being around 3 gigabytes worth of diskspace. Currently I am taking these files and running them through Handbrake to convert them into MPEG-4 which shrinks that same example file size down to around 800 megabytes. At some point I will create a script that executes after a show has finished recording to do the compression for me automagically. For the time being however I am just pleased it works as cleanly as it does.
The setup works extremely well currently for what it is, and the very limited channels that I can receive over the air. If I wanted to upgrade the configuration it would involve moving to a completely different scenario involving getting a Cable card from my provider and setting up something like an HD HomeRun box which would give me access to all of the cable channels we subscribe to. For now I am happy with this little experiment and happy that I only spent $40 to make it happen. Why did I do it when I already had access to the shows I am recording? I just sometimes get dumb ideas stuck in my head and go forward with them.
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