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How to Record TV Shows Using Plex

The popular media server app now has the ability to record over-the-air television.
Endless TV. Image: Eric Chan/Flickr

Plex fans—your prayers have finally been answered.

The latest beta of the popular media server now has the ability to record and manage over-the-air television, allowing cord cutters to watch broadcast shows like ABC's Modern Family, Fox's Empire, and NBC's Saturday Night Live on all of the devices that Plex supports, including the iPhone, Apple TV, and Roku.

Read more: Plex helps explain the future of cord-cutting.

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For Plex users, this means no longer having to troll the web looking for ripped copies of broadcast television shows to fill their library—a time-consuming and ethically dubious process (and one that I'm quite familiar with). And for Plex itself, which started out as a Mac video player in 2007, adding DVR support means the realization of a vision hatched well before the phrase "cord cutting" ever bubbled into the mainstream.

Choosing your recording options. Image: Plex

"[A DVR] has been one of our top requested features for years," Jason Williams, Plex's director of product and growth, told Motherboard. "We just think [Plex] is too awesome of a product to prevent people from using it because the barrier to entry [and finding content] is too high."

So what do you need to be able to watch DVR'd TV shows using the Plex app for iPhone, Roku, and wherever else you may be?

  • An over-the-air antenna (a topic we covered in a recent story)

  • An HDHomeRun TV tuner, which start at around $100

  • A wireless router hooked up to your PC (which should ideally have a pretty big hard drive to hold your recordings)

  • The latest beta of Plex Media Server running on your PC

  • A Plex Pass subscription (which costs $40 per year and grants early access to new features, like the new DVR feature)

The basic diagram looks like this: Your antenna captures the over-the-air television signal and sends it to the HDHomeRun, which in turn feeds it to the Plex Media Server running on your PC. It may seem like a lot, when it's written out like this, but in truth if you can connect a PS4 to your wireless router you should be fine.

Upcoming shows are listed with full metadata, including artwork and plot synopses. Image: Plex

Actually setting all this up inside Plex is pretty straightforward. Using the web interface (right now, DVRs can only be set up in this way), you go to Settings, then click DVR at the bottom of the list. Plex should then auto-discover your HDHomeRun tuner. After that, it's merely a matter of telling the software to scan for available channels.

The actual DVR interface is similar to what you'd find with a TiVo or a cable company-provided DVR. You can browse a program guide to see what shows are coming up or search manually. And just like a real DVR, you can choose whether you want to record an individual episode or every episode in the future. Recorded shows are saved to the PC running the Plex Media Server beta, but can be viewed by any device, including the iPhone and Roku, that you've got Plex up and running on.

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