Can confirm. I've run plex on a xeon box for a year or two. I tried moving over to a raspberry pi to save power, but it simply couldn't handle the encoding tasks.
I tried out Plex Media Server on a Atom server (well, it was a co-opted Eee Box running Ubuntu) and I swear it screamed in pain when it had to transcode. I ended up "obtaining" much of my media in H.264 just to avoid transcoding.
I now run Plex as a Docker image on a Proxmox-equipped home server using an AMD Fusion 2.8GHz w/ Radeon GPU. Plex appears to be well tuned to use the CPU and the GPU to do transcoding, but does stutter if you don't Analyze your library often (this presumably lets Plex transcode in advance).
Dunno if it's an option but the NVIDIA Shield TV can either direct play pretty much anything with Kodi or it can act as a low power Plex server with a hardware video encoder.
The Shield is great, and can handle 2-3 transcodes at a time just sitting there silent. Can share with both me and partners parents who have Roku built in TVs. However I have a lot of h265 content and it will transcode stuff back to h264 and suck up bandwidth/processing when I wish it wouldn't but I think that is a limitation of Roku.
My experience with an HDHomeRun Prime (and CableCard) is that none of Plex's DVR features (not even live TV) work with DRM programs. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but DRM content only appears to be accessible using something like Windows Media Center (specifically, PlayReady). It's not a big deal for me since most of the DRM content channels (that I'm interested in) also offer online streaming options, but it is annoying.
Time Warner / Spectrum encrypts more than 90% of the channels delivered to me so I guess Windows 8 w/ Media Center is the only HTPC option for me still after all these years
I can recall a time not long ago where commercial skipping invoked the fire and fury of the TV networks, which resulted in lawsuits and injunctions against the major DVR makers.
It sounds like Dish and Fox did end up settling out of court (with Dish adding some commercial-skipping limits for Fox-owned content), but apparently that was done more in response to claims of copyright infringement for Dish/Sling features that allowed content to be viewed in unauthorized locations (not the commercial skipping itself).
That said, I don't know if there's a major distinction between what Dish was/is doing with recorded content and what Plex is doing.
I remember when I used to use MythTV's commercial skipping that if it got fooled then the same things that fooled it would fool you too. So you would sometimes miss a chunk and never know it other than coming away with an impression of a disjointed plot. Even though it did a good job and rarely got it wrong the rare wrong time was enough to make me stop using the commercial skipping.
With MythTV you still had the complete file and could go back and check if you were suspicious. In this case the only way to tell would be to find the file somewhere else and compare.
In the 90's I had a Panasonic VCR that would automatically skipped commercials. It worked by detecting what broadcast engineers call "superblack," which is what goes over the air between recordings (say, between a TV show segment and the commercial start, then again at the end of the commercial break). It's a black generated from a lack of signal. Regular "black" like black recorded on tape is less black if you look at it on an oscilloscope, but not detectable to the average eye.
It was a great piece of technology, but had interesting social effects. After a year or so I noticed that I didn't get many of the jokes that people talked about around the water cooler at work. I was unfamiliar with certain catch phrases. I had to ask someone, "What's a macarena?"
In decades past, TV commercials were part of the collective knowledge, and a socializing factor. Think of Coca-Cola's numerous iconic ads. Or Apple's "1984." Today, with so many people streaming shows and skipping commercials on their DVRs, I wonder if that's contributing to the social fragmentation of American society.
I still have an RCA VCR that does that (not that I have a cable signal to feed it anymore). The manual makes some vague references to how it works, but I'm guessing it's pretty similar to your Panasonic.
It was fascinating to watch (well, hear, more accurately) exactly how it did it too. Once a timed recording finished, it would rewind the tape to the start of the recording and "watch" the show at high speed. When it encountered a commercial it would slow down, rewind a bit, and somehow mark the start of the commercial segment on tape, speed up for a bit and somehow mark the end.
When playing back it would turn the screen blue and fast-forward through the previously marked commercial segments automatically. The accuracy was very impressive.
I love Plex! I've never had cable, but since I moved a few years ago, I haven't even bothered connecting an antenna to my TV.
However, between this and the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade (which was streamed to youtube, but in a super-annoying format where you had to constantly adjust the view to actually watch it), I think I might dig out my antenna and hook it back up.
Many open source PVR software packages do this for free (Mythtv, SageTV). If you want better guide data, Schedules Direct is $25/year.
I've been using SageTV (which was the foundation of the Google Fiber TV DVR) for 10 years since before Google bought them an open-sourced it. Between SageTV, Netflix, and ad-blockers, my son has basically never seen a commercial.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 69.6 ms ] threadI now run Plex as a Docker image on a Proxmox-equipped home server using an AMD Fusion 2.8GHz w/ Radeon GPU. Plex appears to be well tuned to use the CPU and the GPU to do transcoding, but does stutter if you don't Analyze your library often (this presumably lets Plex transcode in advance).
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/226463767-Frequent...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/05/tv-networks-say-youre-...
So, what changed?
http://variety.com/2015/biz/news/judge-rules-that-dishs-slin...
It sounds like Dish and Fox did end up settling out of court (with Dish adding some commercial-skipping limits for Fox-owned content), but apparently that was done more in response to claims of copyright infringement for Dish/Sling features that allowed content to be viewed in unauthorized locations (not the commercial skipping itself).
That said, I don't know if there's a major distinction between what Dish was/is doing with recorded content and what Plex is doing.
With MythTV you still had the complete file and could go back and check if you were suspicious. In this case the only way to tell would be to find the file somewhere else and compare.
In the 90's I had a Panasonic VCR that would automatically skipped commercials. It worked by detecting what broadcast engineers call "superblack," which is what goes over the air between recordings (say, between a TV show segment and the commercial start, then again at the end of the commercial break). It's a black generated from a lack of signal. Regular "black" like black recorded on tape is less black if you look at it on an oscilloscope, but not detectable to the average eye.
It was a great piece of technology, but had interesting social effects. After a year or so I noticed that I didn't get many of the jokes that people talked about around the water cooler at work. I was unfamiliar with certain catch phrases. I had to ask someone, "What's a macarena?"
In decades past, TV commercials were part of the collective knowledge, and a socializing factor. Think of Coca-Cola's numerous iconic ads. Or Apple's "1984." Today, with so many people streaming shows and skipping commercials on their DVRs, I wonder if that's contributing to the social fragmentation of American society.
Yes, in the same sense that curing polio has decreased the number of paralyzed and dying children from bonding in hospice facilities.
It was fascinating to watch (well, hear, more accurately) exactly how it did it too. Once a timed recording finished, it would rewind the tape to the start of the recording and "watch" the show at high speed. When it encountered a commercial it would slow down, rewind a bit, and somehow mark the start of the commercial segment on tape, speed up for a bit and somehow mark the end.
When playing back it would turn the screen blue and fast-forward through the previously marked commercial segments automatically. The accuracy was very impressive.
However, between this and the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade (which was streamed to youtube, but in a super-annoying format where you had to constantly adjust the view to actually watch it), I think I might dig out my antenna and hook it back up.
I've been using SageTV (which was the foundation of the Google Fiber TV DVR) for 10 years since before Google bought them an open-sourced it. Between SageTV, Netflix, and ad-blockers, my son has basically never seen a commercial.