BETA: Channels DVR Server for Raspberry Pi 4 (USB BOOT IMAGE)

No luck. I went through the steps and it is returning the same error.

Is there a way to backup my settings and reformat the drive? If so, what is the method for that? I have all of my imports on another drive, so I am not worried about losing them.

Yea you can copy off the Database and TV/Movies folders and then reimage, copy them back, and restore.

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I am back up and running. When through and reimaged it. I am getting the imports migrated over now. Thanks for the help!

Homebridge is very light so I think it would handle it fine unless you intend to do a lot of transcoding.

Hi, I lost all recordings and imports in RPi DVR.

The DVR directory had somehow been turned into read-only mode, 3 recordings had been failed and when I checked the directory structure of DVR, only Database, Images and Streaming were shown. Movies, TV and Import had disappeared. The drive is USB3 external 4TB drive without external power supply. It has been working fine for a month before this.

Mac's Disk Utility was not able to fix the exFAT filesystem and I had to reformat the drive to find out if the drive itself was broken. It was not...

Fortunately, this was my test system and I had my old DVR working at the same time, so all I lost were those three recordings.

I think that the DVR software was updated from 2020-11-06 version to 2020-12-10 (or something like that) before this happened.

I have never trusted FAT filesystems and I'm now back in Mac mini DVR where I use this same drive as HPFS formatted drive.

There were also some other changes I made before this happened, but I think they don't have this kind of effect.

@masterakk I was having something similar happening to me on my RPi but was able to solve it by getting a powered USB 3 hub.

Based on support from Channels developer @tmm1 and other forum posts, I think the bus-powered drive was drawing too much power from the RPi and was creating the ‘read-only’ errors: The RPi 4 does not have enough power for two bus-powered drives.

In my case, I had installed the USB boot image on to a bus-powered USB 3.0 60GB SSD drive, and I also had a bus-powered USB 3.0 5TB WD My Passport drive for my DVR recordings (ExFAT format). Everything had been working fine for several weeks with this configuration, but then about a week ago I kept getting the ‘read-only’ errors and failed recordings.

It’s been about four days since installing the powered USB 3 hub (into which I have plugged the 5TB drive and a 2nd 1TB drive) and fingers crossed so far I have not had any more ‘read-only’ errors. The SSD boot drive is still plugged directly into one of the RPi’s USB 3 ports.

If you have access to a powered USB 3 hub, you may want to try that and see if it works for you.

My first thought also was to power the drive separately, as drives powered by the pi only have been known to have issues for many users.

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It looks like Homebridge is an image file intended to be dd' to the flash card. You can download the source but I haven't seen a compiler installed on the Channels Pi image so this will likely be an uphill challenge. That said, there are instructions on Homebridge to install on Docker which might work for you. I've had success running the Pluto-for-channels on Docker on the RasPi Channels image--but I always have to do a docker ps after reboot to kick things.

You asked if the RPi4 can handle--I think it could allow a small additional load. I've had 6-8 things (recording, watching, mix of OTA HDHR Conn, Sling, Pluto, WatchATT) and have not noticed any glitches. But the RasPi4 is pretty loaded at this point. I wouldn't try with a smaller Pi but you don't need the larger RAM versions.

You can install Homebridge on RPi along with everything else on your pi, just follow the instructions here: https://github.com/homebridge/homebridge/wiki/Install-Homebridge-on-Raspbian

That is not going to be compatible with the RPi Channels DVR software image without some work. Many tools like apt or gcc are not available. Docker however is available so running from that framework would require minimal effort on the RPi DVR.

I understand that, but I read your reply that it was just an image that you install directly to the flash card, and was pointing out an alternate method. Anyone who wants to get into Homebridge should be savvy enough to install Channels to RPi the old fashioned way and not need to use the image. I'm new to RPi, bought it for Channels just before they came out with the dedicated image, and it's really pretty easy to setup. I've also been able to install Homebridge, and the Pluto Docker all on the same Pi, with virtually no issues.

Curious if there are default SMB credentials I need to use to login to the SMB Server once enabled? Windows prompts me for network credentials, and I'm not clear on what those would be or how I would set them from the server setup page.

OTA buffering present again - hangs when starting a channel.

50ea23b3-6d78-4cc6-82a8-0ead39262bb8 submitted

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Same here. Running the pre-rel builds.

Question, is it normal to get the following error when trying to SFTP to an RPi Channels DVR?

bash: /usr/libexec/sftp-server: No such file or directory

I can successfully ssh as root to the device, but I get that error when trying to sftp instead using the following command.

sftp -P 22222 root@{ip address}

samba is meant to be the default file transfer process - it's configurable top-right on the settings page.

Thanks @hancox, the only reason I asked is that @tmm1 mentioned using sftp in this thread and I wanted to explore that but couldn't make it work.

Can anyone point me to the instructions on how to get the RPi Channels DVR converted to use wifi versus wired?

Any issues with using a flash/thumb drive for the OS, and non SSD for storage?
Or is using a small SSD preferred for the OS?

The OS drive still stores the guide database, which gets daily updates. So its preferred not to use a flash drive for that I think, just because a lot of thumb drives aren't that great. I don't think an SSD is required either, but they are pretty affordable these days.