What is the best affordable hardware to run channels DVR? NAS? Or processor speed for an old pic? I believe I have an i3 and that won’t work with plex
Sorry, meant to say old pc
Do you have the processor model of the i3 or your NAS? anything you have that is existing would be the most affordable.
if its running windows, try running msinfo32.exe to get processor information.
Old PCs from the last 3-5 years run Channels DVR really well.
This pc is older than that but I have made some upgrades. Windows 10, ssd drive 8g of ram. Still has older processor. Originally came with vista
Look up the processor model and post it here
AMD Athalon 64x2 dual core processor 5600+. Graphics card has been upgrade to HDMI out
Should work well for recording, playback and commercial detection. I’m not sure if you’ll be able to transcode for remote playback, but in-home will work just fine.
Great, thanks for the help
When I go to load the channels app on my pc from the link on the website it gives me an error that this app can’t run on you pc. To find a version for your pc check with the software publisher
Are you running windows 10 64-bit?
Yes
I’m running the DVR on a Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 2+, which was a really nice NAS… back in 2011.
It’s a dual core 1.8GHz Intel Atom and it runs Channels DVR brilliantly. Although I haven’t actually tried transcoding. But from just watching live TV or a recording it registers maybe 3-5% CPU usage.
So pretty much any Intel based PC will work fine, since the i3 is much faster than the Atom.
Intel Atom can’t transcode, so we recommend Celeron or Pentium
I've been running Channels DVR on a Raspberry Pi and it works great for the house. However, i would like to be able to watch remotely. the pi is not up to the task of transcoding. Does anybody have any budget solution suggestions to replace the pi with? Are there minimum specs i should be looking for? If i purchased the HDHomerun tuner that transcodes, would that allow me to watch remotely?
I'll appreciate any input. Thanks
Actually, the GPU on the Pi does support hardware h.264 encoding, so if the DVR's version of ffmpeg was compiled to include support for it, you could probably have hardware-assisted transcoding for remote viewing.
I haven't checked the ARM version of the DVR to see which options were compiled in for it, but this might be a possibility. The sever might need to be modified to expose the hardware transcode options on the Pi, though.
We've tried the hardware h264 encoder on the Pi. The quality it produces is not very good, and it is not fast enough for real time 60fps encoding of live tv.
The budget option for transcoding capable server is the MyCloud Home. However I would recommend any Intel Celeron based computer or NAS.
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That's because the Pi2's hardware encoder only supports 1080p30. Of course, that's irrespective of the quality, which obviously plays a bigger role. Also, deinterlacing is probably a big factor, too.
I am looking at getting the synology ds218+
Would this be sufficient to watch dvd recordings remotely? how about live OTA tv from my antenna connected to my hd homerun?
Thanks again