Over-the-Air (OTA) Television in Plex
Over-the-air television with an antenna may seem old fashioned, but it’s still a thing, it’s still free, and there’s a surprising amount of tech available with it. I recently set up an OTA antenna to feed into Plex, so I can watch local channels at home or anywhere, and I can DVR shows to watch later. It’s awesome.
We had TVs with antennas back when I was a kid, but cable television was already more popular. Antennas were for the camper we kept down at Lake Murray, or the rooms that didn’t get as much use at home. Cable TV was the preferred source of entertainment, but cable providers like Charter only allowed so many boxes per subscription. Antennas gave you something to watch, but it was the inferior option.
When we sold our house and moved into a camper for a while, OTA TV wasn’t even on my radar. This was in 2022, so cable TV was already on the way out and streaming services were the way most people consumed visual media. Problem is, we didn’t have great internet in the camper. We had a mobile hotspot device, but that had a data limit and it struggled to support more than just my wife and I working on our laptops. Streaming video wouldn’t cut it.
For a while, it was just a way to keep the TV playing while the kids were asleep. Streaming services will time out after an hour or two of inactivity, but OTA broadcasts stay on. Eventually, though, the kids started actively wanting to watch some of the shows that were on regularly. “Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum” was a big one. The kids wanted to watch it, even when it wasn’t being actively broadcast. WHAT YEAR IS IT??
Plex can do a lot, and I think it’s a really good entertainment hub. I started looking into whether it supported live TV, and sure enough it does. With that, I could set those particular shows to DVR and the kids would be able to watch them whenever. I decided to dive in and see what I could accomplish. My first step was a cheap USB tuner on Amazon. For another not even thirty bucks, I could potentially have my own streaming service that would aggregate broadcast content FOR FREE. Take that, Netflix!
About the same time, YouTube TV decided to increase their subscription price to $83 a month. We picked it up for NCAA football, but that’s just more than I could justify paying every single month. With local channels, there’s a chance we could get our football fix without such an obscenely expensive subscription. Worst case scenario, we could pick up YTTV again for a few months, but this solidified my decision to build out our OTA TV experience to be as good as possible.
I moved my Plex server laptop into the kids’ room and hooked up the USB tuner and a coax splitter off the antenna. The wifi connection isn’t great that far from the router, but it was decent enough to get connected. I opened Plex to manage my tuner, but Plex didn’t recognize it. I assumed that since it wasn’t one of Plex’s officially supported tuners, it probably wouldn’t work. I would have to get another tuner eventually, but I didn’t want to pay that much for it until I knew I would take advantage of it.
Instead, I decided to fiddle with the tuner on its own and see if I could at least get a video stream on the laptop. I downloaded the drivers, user manual, and viewer application from the manufacturer’s site. After installing the drivers and the viewer application, I still didn’t have any input. That was weird. This was a decently rated (albeit cheap) USB tuner. I understand that it might not play nice with an internet-connected setup like Plex, but I should at least be able to watch the channels through my computer.
After reading the manual (go figure!), I realized that I needed to scan for channels. I hit the channel button and started the scan. Very quickly, local channels started showing up. Once the scan was finished, video and audio started coming through same as on the TV. The tuner worked!
With actual OTA content coming through, I went back to Plex to see if it was a driver issue. Sure enough, Plex immediately recognized the antenna. I started scanning channels into Plex directly. By the evening of March 27, I was able to watch NCAA basketball with the Duke vs Arizona game of March Madness on live TV. We were in business.
One potential source of improvement was a better antenna. The one I got was really cheap, and it gave us something to let the kids watch, but I expected I would be able to get a lot more channels if I got a better antenna and mounted it higher up in our attic rather than in a bedroom window.
Mac.bid came through for me with an Antennas Direct ClearStream 4V. Normally over $100, I won that auction for $9. It was open box (probably because someone bought it and decided they didn’t care to set it up), but all the pieces were there and I was able to get it together with no trouble at all. I also picked up some twist-on coax connectors to finally terminate the coax that I got installed from the attic to the living room. It was all coming together. I got it all hooked up and the quality did seem better than what we were getting before.
I moved the Plex server back into the living room near the router for a better internet connection. Then, I hooked the USB tuner up again, still with a splitter so that we could watch directly on the TV in the event that Plex isn’t working right. With the rescan after the antenna was installed up in the attic, I got 52 channels, as opposed to the 37 channels I had with the old antenna in the kids’ bedroom. Improvement!
With live TV available, I decided to try out the DVR functionality. Plex will allow you to pick particular episodes, or you can set all episodes of a given show to record. I haven’t gotten all episodes to work yet, but individual episodes seem to work great. I created a new directory to save DVR content to, just to keep it distinct from my other media, but so far the recording aspect has been super easy and user-friendly.
What’s REALLY cool is that Plex detects the show title, episode number, and episode name from the guide. THEN, it creates a directory for the show and names the file such that it matches the file structure and naming scheme that Plex is expecting. You literally don’t have to do anything to get episodes to show up in the TV Shows area of Plex. As soon as the episode airs, the file is saved in the right location and you can watch it again as often as you want.
Once football season starts, we’ll see if this is a viable alternative to YouTube TV permanently. It’s certainly nice to have something for the kids to watch, and I like being able to just turn the TV on and have material playing without having to choose something, so it’s still been a productive endeavor. If I can get South Carolina Gamecocks and Clemson Tigers football without paying for it, though? THAT’S the real goal. We’ll see how that turns out this fall.
When we sold our house and moved into a camper for a while, OTA TV wasn’t even on my radar. This was in 2022, so cable TV was already on the way out and streaming services were the way most people consumed visual media. Problem is, we didn’t have great internet in the camper. We had a mobile hotspot device, but that had a data limit and it struggled to support more than just my wife and I working on our laptops. Streaming video wouldn’t cut it.
The camper had a built-in antenna on the roof, and one day I decided to plug a coax into our TV just to see what happened. We pretty much just used the TV to play the Nintendo Switch on, so it would be nice to be able to watch something on occasion. Lo and behold, I ran a channel scan and we actually picked up a few channels. It wasn’t much, but we did pick up an evening ritual of watching Wipeout every night before bed. It was a nice memory in an otherwise pretty dark time.
After we moved out of that God-forsaken camper and into an apartment, we still needed a way to watch TV. I wasn’t going to get an internet subscription at the apartment for just a couple of months, so we kept the mobile hotspot. Obviously, the antenna was still attached to the camper, but I decided to pick up a cheap window antenna on Amazon. Thirty bucks to have something to watch seemed like a reasonable price. Even if we never used it after we moved out, it was still about the same price as a few months of most streaming services.
After we moved into the newly constructed house, I assumed we would never bother with the antenna again. However, some unexpected internet woes gave it extended value. Spectrum decided our house was too far from the road to run a line to. Our local ISP would be running fiber soon, but their current infrastructure only supported 20mbps DSL. We ended up with T-Mobile Home Internet with my mother’s house as the official service address. It wasn’t much more than a slightly improved mobile hotspot without a data limit, so video streaming still didn’t really work. The antenna went in the kids’ bedroom to have something on their TV at night.
After we moved out of that God-forsaken camper and into an apartment, we still needed a way to watch TV. I wasn’t going to get an internet subscription at the apartment for just a couple of months, so we kept the mobile hotspot. Obviously, the antenna was still attached to the camper, but I decided to pick up a cheap window antenna on Amazon. Thirty bucks to have something to watch seemed like a reasonable price. Even if we never used it after we moved out, it was still about the same price as a few months of most streaming services.
After we moved into the newly constructed house, I assumed we would never bother with the antenna again. However, some unexpected internet woes gave it extended value. Spectrum decided our house was too far from the road to run a line to. Our local ISP would be running fiber soon, but their current infrastructure only supported 20mbps DSL. We ended up with T-Mobile Home Internet with my mother’s house as the official service address. It wasn’t much more than a slightly improved mobile hotspot without a data limit, so video streaming still didn’t really work. The antenna went in the kids’ bedroom to have something on their TV at night.
For a while, it was just a way to keep the TV playing while the kids were asleep. Streaming services will time out after an hour or two of inactivity, but OTA broadcasts stay on. Eventually, though, the kids started actively wanting to watch some of the shows that were on regularly. “Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum” was a big one. The kids wanted to watch it, even when it wasn’t being actively broadcast. WHAT YEAR IS IT??
Plex can do a lot, and I think it’s a really good entertainment hub. I started looking into whether it supported live TV, and sure enough it does. With that, I could set those particular shows to DVR and the kids would be able to watch them whenever. I decided to dive in and see what I could accomplish. My first step was a cheap USB tuner on Amazon. For another not even thirty bucks, I could potentially have my own streaming service that would aggregate broadcast content FOR FREE. Take that, Netflix!
About the same time, YouTube TV decided to increase their subscription price to $83 a month. We picked it up for NCAA football, but that’s just more than I could justify paying every single month. With local channels, there’s a chance we could get our football fix without such an obscenely expensive subscription. Worst case scenario, we could pick up YTTV again for a few months, but this solidified my decision to build out our OTA TV experience to be as good as possible.
I moved my Plex server laptop into the kids’ room and hooked up the USB tuner and a coax splitter off the antenna. The wifi connection isn’t great that far from the router, but it was decent enough to get connected. I opened Plex to manage my tuner, but Plex didn’t recognize it. I assumed that since it wasn’t one of Plex’s officially supported tuners, it probably wouldn’t work. I would have to get another tuner eventually, but I didn’t want to pay that much for it until I knew I would take advantage of it.
Instead, I decided to fiddle with the tuner on its own and see if I could at least get a video stream on the laptop. I downloaded the drivers, user manual, and viewer application from the manufacturer’s site. After installing the drivers and the viewer application, I still didn’t have any input. That was weird. This was a decently rated (albeit cheap) USB tuner. I understand that it might not play nice with an internet-connected setup like Plex, but I should at least be able to watch the channels through my computer.
After reading the manual (go figure!), I realized that I needed to scan for channels. I hit the channel button and started the scan. Very quickly, local channels started showing up. Once the scan was finished, video and audio started coming through same as on the TV. The tuner worked!
With actual OTA content coming through, I went back to Plex to see if it was a driver issue. Sure enough, Plex immediately recognized the antenna. I started scanning channels into Plex directly. By the evening of March 27, I was able to watch NCAA basketball with the Duke vs Arizona game of March Madness on live TV. We were in business.
One potential source of improvement was a better antenna. The one I got was really cheap, and it gave us something to let the kids watch, but I expected I would be able to get a lot more channels if I got a better antenna and mounted it higher up in our attic rather than in a bedroom window.
Mac.bid came through for me with an Antennas Direct ClearStream 4V. Normally over $100, I won that auction for $9. It was open box (probably because someone bought it and decided they didn’t care to set it up), but all the pieces were there and I was able to get it together with no trouble at all. I also picked up some twist-on coax connectors to finally terminate the coax that I got installed from the attic to the living room. It was all coming together. I got it all hooked up and the quality did seem better than what we were getting before.
I moved the Plex server back into the living room near the router for a better internet connection. Then, I hooked the USB tuner up again, still with a splitter so that we could watch directly on the TV in the event that Plex isn’t working right. With the rescan after the antenna was installed up in the attic, I got 52 channels, as opposed to the 37 channels I had with the old antenna in the kids’ bedroom. Improvement!
With live TV available, I decided to try out the DVR functionality. Plex will allow you to pick particular episodes, or you can set all episodes of a given show to record. I haven’t gotten all episodes to work yet, but individual episodes seem to work great. I created a new directory to save DVR content to, just to keep it distinct from my other media, but so far the recording aspect has been super easy and user-friendly.
What’s REALLY cool is that Plex detects the show title, episode number, and episode name from the guide. THEN, it creates a directory for the show and names the file such that it matches the file structure and naming scheme that Plex is expecting. You literally don’t have to do anything to get episodes to show up in the TV Shows area of Plex. As soon as the episode airs, the file is saved in the right location and you can watch it again as often as you want.
Once football season starts, we’ll see if this is a viable alternative to YouTube TV permanently. It’s certainly nice to have something for the kids to watch, and I like being able to just turn the TV on and have material playing without having to choose something, so it’s still been a productive endeavor. If I can get South Carolina Gamecocks and Clemson Tigers football without paying for it, though? THAT’S the real goal. We’ll see how that turns out this fall.
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