Great, thanks! (and yes, mainly will be watching at home on wifi with original quality via the Fire TV app)
Also, sounds like I can probably ditch Plex if I use Channels new add local content feature (ideally using this custom RPI4 build). Is there any documentation around this local content feature? I was just using Plex for basic playback of some local movies/shows, nothing fancy.
Not right now. There's not much to it. Just point Channels at your TV and Movie folders, it'll scan them in. If plex scanned them in well, so will Channels. It helps if movies have a year in the filename like (2014).
If they scan in wrong, just find them in your library in the web admin and you can use the Fix Incorrect Match function.
I've got my Pi setup the old way and Plex is fairly easy to install, but there are a few quirks. But the local content feature works pretty well. A tip: if you have issues with Fix Incorrect Match not finding the correct movie, go to Zap2It, search for the movie, and in the URL copy the code after tmsId=, example for Frozen II -> tmsId=MV010390160000 copy the MV010390160000 and paste into the search box and the correct movie will show up. For some reason it won't find some movies based on name and year alone.
We've got a ticket in with Gracenote about these movies with numerals that can't be found. It's extremely frustrating, sorry guys.
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At least there is a work around. We appreciate the hard work.
Tried unsuccessfully to find a match for “Roma” from 2018. On zap2it, there are so many matches (but not the one I need), and no way I can see to get to a complete list. So I’m stumped on that one.
MV011862050000
Thank you!!
I migrated from an existing installation RPi 4 on Raspbian with the Channels DVR Server installed on an external USB3.0 HD (EXT4 format)-- over to a new installation of Channels DVR Server for RPi 4 (USB Boot Image).
I've flashed the Boot Image to a 60GB SSD, powered it up and plugged in the same EXT4 formatted USB3.0 HD which has all of my old recordings from my Raspbian installation. I restored the latest DVR database from backup, but when I go to activate the previous DVR folder (from the prior Raspbian installation) on the web interface I get Error: no write permissions on dvr directory.
So I created a new, second DVR folder on the same USB3.0 HD, and now I can activate the DVR and start recordings, etc. But all of my old recordings made with the Raspbian installation are visible, but I cannot play any of them: I can only see that they are there. New recordings record and play fine into the new DVR folder.
But now I have two DVR folders on that USB3.0 HD, one from the old Raspbian install and one from the new USB Boot install:
My question is -- what is the best way to get access to my old recordings made with my Raspbian installation? Do I need to get a second blank USB3.0 HD, and copy over everything to that?
(I had hoped that I could connect to the Samba mount via the Finder and move the old recordings / folders, but I can't modify anything).
Thank you in advance for your assistance.
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Please click Support > Submit Diagnostics. I didn't test with ext4 so the permissions aren't right.
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Logs submitted as 71384cb6-5f9f-4370-9151-ca09604bf369. Thank you.
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Okay so you need to fix the permissions on the old DVR folder as follows:
chown -R 501:501 /media/EXT2TB/DVR
You will need to do this either on another Linux machine, or by enabling SSH on the Pi and connecting to port 22222
I couldn’t get the chown command to work exactly as you had it written, but here’s what I tried (unsuccessfully).
- I put the old microSD card with Raspbian back into the RPi 4 (basically my old Channels DVR setup) and the EXT4 USB HD shows up in /mnt, not /media.
- So in Terminal, I changed the chown command you provided to point to /mnt/EXT2TB/DVR (instead of /media/EXT2TB/DVR), and the chown command responded with a bunch of files with ‘operation not permitted’.
- Then, trying to modify the permissions using the RaspbianOS File Manager, right-clicking on the /mnt/EXT2TB/DVR folder and changing the permissions gave a response about not being able to change permissions on symlinks. But the permissions tab Access Control now says Anyone can View / Change / Access content.
I connected the EXT4 drive to my RPi 2B, ran the chown command and it still gave me ‘operation not permitted’. [The drive was mounted at /media/pi/EXT2TB/DVR, so I changed the chown command accordingly].
Since that didn’t work, can I assume it would just be easier to get a new blank HD and copy over the old recordings to the new drive?
Thanks again for your assistance.
I'm surprised it didn't work. Can you share some of the failure messages? Perhaps you need to use sudo in front?
Here’s a screencap of the errors with chown.
But when I put sudo in front of the chown, it completed without any errors. Maybe that worked?
@tmm1 So I confirmed that sudo chown did work, I can now enable my old DVR with the new USB Boot. Thanks!
How best should I consolidate these two DVR folders into one?
- Can I move the few new recordings from the DVR_New folder into the previous DVR folder (which I just ran sudo chown on, respecting TV / Movie folder structure)? I tried cutting / pasting from DVR_New —> DVR and it gave a Permission Denied error.
- Or should I move the old recordings into the Imported folder of the DVR_New?
Thanks again.
Sounds like it worked with sudo if there were no errors shown.
I would move the files from the new folder to the old one. Do it with sudo, then run that chown again at the end.
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Will do - thank you again for your help!
I had everything working on my EXT4 formatted USB drive for about a day before I noticed that recordings were failing with a permissions error (read-only file system).
The DVR Support web page gave the following error under Disk Permissions:
Could not write to recording directories: /media/EXT2TB/DVR, /media/EXT2TB/DVR/TV, /media/EXT2TB/DVR/Movies.
I believe the DVR Server updated at least one time between it working and not working, I don't know if that contributed to the read-only errors coming back.
I re-ran sudo chown -R 501:501 /media/pi/EXT2TB/DVR (several times for good measure) and that seems to have fixed things for now: I no longer get the Disk Permissions error on the Support page.
I submitted this log c20e9bff-a229-42df-89f6-4644d1d6c21a via email as well.
Thank you.
PS. In the near future I plan to get a new 4TB USB3.0 drive and format it to ExFAT so I no longer have to deal with EXT4 and the permissions errors it seems to be causing.
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