I am not on the beta but I have a couple questions.
You said ānow that streaming goes through the DVRā
I can see many opportunities with going trough the DVR for everything. Just worried about the overhead. I currently have a pretty powerful MAC MINI (i7 Quad).
Not sure about the overhead yetā¦ we need more people to test it out and report how well it works (or doesnāt work).
For now we plan to keep this beta-only feature, until we have more confidence that it works well for everyone (including people with lower-powered NAS).
Transcoding is currently not supported, in order to further minimize overhead. The DVR simply copies the raw stream from the tuner and sends it to all ATVs who are viewing the same channel.
Is this a different beta track than the normal TestFlight? My ATVās TestFlight app says Iām not testing anything anymore (though the last beta I had continues to work).
You need to click the link in the first post to receive the invite. Itās the same app, but you have to accept it in TestFlight again.
Performance on Mac Mini 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7 with 16 GB Memory
Streaming to 8 Apple TVās.
I have 2 Primeās but you are only using 1 of them. So had to limit to 3 tuners for all 8 ATVās.
Mac is showing on average 40% CPU and 21 Threads and 340.0 MB
Very little Memory being used.
Network showing Packets (roughly)
IN = 10,000
OUT = 15,000
HD Shows looking good.
thank you for this feature!
Just my 2 cents on going through DVR. The only concern I have since coming from Windows Media Center is sometimes there would be picture problems (stuttering) on my wired network. A 7 second skip back would take care of this, but annoying. One thing I love about channels is it does not go through the DVR and I have not seen this issue once. And the drive I was using was a 7200 rpm drive too with a Q6600 Quad core only doing WMC.
@TricBox Would be interested to hear how things work for you on this beta. Note that we do not use the disk at all while streaming via the DVR, so there should be less chance of problems compared to how other DVRs do it.
I havenāt tried test but what happens when the DVR goes offline?
When the DVR is unavailable, the app will connect directly to the HDHR like before.
Is all I need Test Flight and the invite? I could give it a shot.
So far, everything is working well with my QNAP TS-453 Pro NAS and the 2 Apple TV 4 devices that Iāve been using. I am amazed at how fluid everything is with the tuner sharing. I tested pausing, rewinding, fast forwarding on one client while another client was playing the same channel and there are no hiccups to report.
I havenāt really noticed much change in CPU or RAM usage. Iāve seen a spike up to 47% for around a minute or so (Iām also using the NAS for XenServer VMs), but I normally hover around 7-10% with 3% of RAM in use (I upgraded to 16GB on the NAS).
Everything is working great for me on my WD PR2100! I just have a question about streaming though the DVR. So are you saying that the HDHR is completely out of the mix for anything recorded and the DVR is reading from the disk?
Video streams always come from the HDHR. Now the DVR is able to act like a splitter, so the video goes from the HDHR to the DVR, and then to all the ATVs or recordings which want it.
Does this mean you can add the feature to have a live TV buffer always recording on the DVR? Using DirecTV DVRs, I often hit record while in the middle of a show Iām watching live and the DVR saves the buffer for the whole show. I would love to have that feature back!
Iām hoping this is also laying the groundwork for recording/watching multiple programmes carried on the same RF channel using only 1 tuner. Not such a big deal in the US/Canada, but a huge plus in DVB countries where many services are carried on a single RF channel (e.g., recording something on BBC1 and BBC2 at the same time with 1 tuner).
To add to others. I am hoping this will lead to PiP. i.e. Transcode the streams to MPEG4 and use the Apple TV Video API. Also, I would like to use the Apple TV remotely in this manner. I think currently you can only use the Web UI Remotely. Could be wrong since I did not set it up.
As always, great work by the developers.
Believe you are correct. I am not able to use remote tuners via AppleTV. (I travel with an ATV), have to use web right now.
