Silly question I'm sure, but is there any way Channels DVR can be set up on two separate PCs on a single home network?
The idea is to have one where my son has control over everything that's set up on "his" Channels DVR and I have control over everything that's set up on "my" Channels DVR - with the exception of sharing network resources such as tuners and storage. I guess it would be like having a Channels 1 and a Channels 2 each being a distinct/separate application using their own ports.
You can run two instances on different computers. Only one would be able to use remote access.
You can turn off the bonjour on both and let the clients pick the right one by entering the IP.
By "only one would be able to use remote access", do you mean that one of us would not be able to view our Channels' content from outside the home?
Correct.
To do that you would need two separate subscriptions, and then the second one would set a custom remote port which you would forward accordingly on your router.
I was assuming two subscriptions already.
How involved is it to customize the port a 2nd Channels DVR would use? Does something have to change in a configuration file in addition to setting up another port forward in the router?
The internal port cannot be changed from 8089 currently.
On Linux and NAS people use docker to run as a container with a different port. Not sure how you would do that on Windows.
Typically you would have two computers and router would send:
On Windows 11, you can run the Linux version of Channels on WSL. Then use WSL-Port-Forwarding · PyPI to forward any chosen port to the WSL container's port 8089. This should work as it works in Virtualbox or Hyper-V. But, I haven't tested it.
We've added a new command line parameter for channels-server to bind to a different port:
$ channels-server -port=8099
Please be aware: this is an experimental feature and there may be things that don't work right. If you try this out and run into problems, please let us know.
how can you do this within windows?
Any way to do this with a Synology Package install?
Is there an environment variable that can be set instead?
EDIT: Nevermind, modified the Synology script
/var/packages/ChannelsDVR/scripts/start-stop-status and got it working on port 8190.
case "$1" in
start)
if [ -f $PID_FILE -a "$(cat $PID_FILE)" = "$(pidof channels-dvr)" ]; then
echo "$APP_NAME is already running." > $SYNOPKG_TEMP_LOGFILE
exit 1
fi
../latest/channels-dvr -port=8190 </dev/null >>channels-dvr.log 2>&1 &