I have placed an order for a LeMaker HiKey 960 board. Like the Firefly, this is a more expensive board, at $240, more akin to top-of-the-line phones and tablets. It runs Android only, at the moment, but that is still Linux-based, and so in theory it should be possible to run Channels DVR from it. On paper, this has something like 2x the performance of the Firefly RK3399 and so it should be able to support realtime software transcoding of HD sources, which makes it ideal for building up into a high performance NAS and media server. Also, being a very standard 96board on the mainline Android kernel, with a decent GPU, I think it has a very high probability of eventually getting hardware transcoding capability. I’ll report back soon.
Top post has been edited to reflect the addition of the Android TV version of Channels DVR, which has been confirmed to work with the NVidia Shield.
Top post edited to reflect recent advances. Some systems with potential seem to be problematic, and I have commented some more on that.
I am favoring increasingly popular Rockchip RK3399-based systems running Linux. Currently with price points around $150, they are rapidly dropping in price, and should be possible to get running for ~$100 by May 2018. The one negative is that hardware encoding support is immature, and not implemented in FFMPEG yet, and so real-time streaming from Channels DVR doesn’t work at the moment. However, there are plenty of reasons to have confidence that this situation will improve.