Bought new Mac Mini

Channels DVR Server
#1

Last fall I bought a Mac Mini. Expecting Spectrum to stop supporting cable card in my TiVo I bought the most powerful (and of course expensive) one available. When Spectrum contacted me for the eighth time about giving up my cable card for some perks, I caved and did it. I also bought the HDHomeRun Flex 4K box to replace my old DUO. Even though I get 43 local channels with my attic antenna, I don’t need to record more than four of them at one time because I’m keeping Spectrum for the TVE channels.

Here is the configuration of my Mac Mini:

3.2GHz 6-core 8th-generation Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 4.6GHz)

64GB 2666MHz DDR4

Intel UHD Graphics 630

2TB SSD storage

Gigabit Ethernet

There are of course several programs I run occasionally including booting into Windows 11 now and again, but I only run Channels, Plex, and Time Machine automatic backups all the time.

My two questions are:

  1. How many concurrent recordings can I reasonably expect to schedule? With two TiVos I was able to record eight programs at once.

  2. How should I tweak Channels Server for best performance? Only tweak I saw was the number of threads for commercial detection, which I’ve set to 3.

Thanks, folks. It’s a big jump for me and my wife to transition from many years of using TiVo to using Channels DVR, but it’s now a necessary thing.

#2

With both the Duo and the Flex 4K, that gives you 6 OTA tuners. As far as TVE, that is limited by your internet bandwidth. The only other bottleneck will be disk I/O, which will be more constrained with the more large-bitrate OTA recordings you handle at once.

(My DVR runs on a old PC with 1/4 the specs of yours, and I have had it recording 8 programs at once without issue.)

You don't need to tweak anything. A DVR is very resource-friendly. It uses basically no CPU, GPU, or RAM. The only place those resources come into play are the GPU for transcoding for remote streaming, and the CPU for commercial detection.

Just remember that once you reboot into Windows, your DVR won't be running.

#3

Many thanks for your reply, racameron! I probably will keep the DUO as backup, since I don't want to split the antenna signal any more, and I really don't need more than 4 OTA tuners. We have Hulu to stream shows that end up there the following day.

I have 400Mb down, usually measuring in the high 300's with SpeedTest over WiFi. Plus, the Mini is connected via ethernet.

Looks like I should be fine to go 100% Channels DVR and sell my two Tivos and three TiVo Minis after a few months.

#4

I may suggest disabling spotlight search for your DVR mount, unless you think it will be used. That’s really the only tweak I’ve done to my
M1.

1 Like
#5

Thanks, hancocks! Will do!

#6

I run Parallels app on my Mac mini. It run Windows 11 as a virtual machine so I don’t have a problem with DVR.

#7

Thanks! I know I could do that. But BOOTCAMP works OK for me. And I rarely need Windows - my Mac Air is also dual-boot, so I can always go to that if I need.