Sadly, all that simplicity means that there's a lack of functionality. In no particular order:
- The program guide is extremely limited. There's no grid-style guide to browse. You can see what's currently on, and search for specific future shows. But if you want to browse to see what's coming up tonight, or tomorrow, or next week, you're out of luck.
- No option for recording a specific time and channel. This means that if the program guide is wrong for some reason (which happens regularly when there's special programs like live sports or news specials), there's no way to record the program even if you know when it will air.
- Playback on the Plex Fire TV app is inconsistent. Some shows play fine, others are extremely choppy. I looked at all the settings and did some web searching, but all I could find was something about needing to transcode the video. Which makes no sense considering that the shows are all being recorded by the same Plex TV backend, so they should all be in the same format. No reason that some would need transcoding and others would not.
- Moving around within a recording is limited. You can skip ahead 30 seconds or back 10 seconds. I've tried hitting the skip ahead multiple times to go 3-4 minutes ahead, but it doesn't always work. There's also a delay on audio after you skip ahead.
- There's a beta option for commercial skipping, but it doesn't work very well. Worse, it actually cuts the "commercial" that it identifies out of the video file, so if it makes a mistake and cuts some of the actual program, it's gone.
On top of the limited functionality, the DVR functionality requires that you subscribe to Plex Pass. It's $40/year, roughly double what I pay for my current setup. (MythTV and Kodi are free, but I pay for program guide updates.)
So for now, I'm sticking with Kodi and MythTV. It's more complicated to set up (but I've already done that) and has some issues of its own, but it works much better for my needs.
