• hedgehogging_the_bed@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Nearly hucked my Vizio out last night as I discovered that between last football season and today they have hidden the broadcast channels I receive with my antenna, in their “Free+” offerings and no longer show the channel number when you rotate between them.

    This also means that when you choose “Antenna” from the input menu, you get around 15 seconds of black screen while it loads an informative slide about the change and then demands you press the OK button to finish loading their program

    Then, to change the channel you must open their fiddly “broadcast guide” and use it to choose the channel you want to watch (after 15 second loading delay for the guide and another 5 second delay once you’ve picked a channel.

    To change the TV from the Nintendo game to Fox took me 10 minutes. Then I realized Fox was showing the Packers game and I needed CBS and it took me 5 more minutes to find the menu again and find CBS.

    Just last February this exact same action took maybe 20 seconds? Turn TV on, change input to Antenna, flip channels manually.

    • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Look into plex! They have a dvr option, and you just need some sort of old, but functional PC to run the server and a cheap add-on to connect your antenna to it. It’s amazing if you get clear signals!

      • CeeBee@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        There’s also Jellyfin, which is better than Plex as your login doesn’t rely on their corporate servers. Jellyfin is 100% local.

        • Sjy@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          My support also goes to Jellyfin but I have both plex and Jellyfin running because occasionally Jellyfin will have a playback error that I’ve tried to but failed to diagnose. Have yet to have any playback errors on plex, but again my go to is Jellyfin because it’s local, the UI is more customizable and in my opinion the UI is just better.

          • CeeBee@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a playback error on Jellyfin that wasn’t related to my power going out and my NAS not coming back up (thus Jellyfin not having an actual video to serve). Jellyfin has been incredibly stable for me.

            • Sjy@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Unfortunately I can still reproduce the errors. Happens with a few shows but only when using the Jellyfin app on a fire stick. I’ve never had any playback issues using the Jellyfin app on my Roku TV. So, in those very few situations, I just use plex.

              • CeeBee@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                It sounds like a codec error. I would bet that if you checked the files experiencing the errors it would have some esoteric codec or be a format your host can’t easily decode, or it’s a format the playing device hardware can’t decode but the Jellyfin player doesn’t know that (somehow Jellyfin isn’t getting correct info).

                I’ve had that before with a really old avi file with divx. I re-encoded the file to MP4 with h264 and it works perfectly.

                • Sjy@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  Well, thanks friend, tried to figure it out again and couldn’t. But I did a full, I’m going to figure this out and changing some playback settings fixed it. Not sure why it only threw the error on one show, but it’s fixed now…

                  Now, you wouldn’t have any clue how to setup Jellyfin (or would you be able to point me to somewhere that would help) so it has the option of skipping intros, would you? I’m running it in a docker container on a synology nas.

        • voxel@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          plex still has some advantages, like it can run natively on more devices (e.g. playstation)

      • hedgehogging_the_bed@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Ooo, there’s a name I haven’t heard in a bit. I had Plex sometime a decade ago. I had a Boxee 2 Beta test device around the same time or maybe later. They were followed by an early Roku which I have neglected to replace and got stuck relying on the Vizio software for the antenna.