I've moved all my media over to Channels (except music of course). Channels does a fine job for how I use it. Plex is fine but my preference is to have fewer apps. If Channels brings in music (doubt that will ever happen) I will ditch Plex all together.
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I am pointing out @maddox response because it bares repeating. You simply tell Channels where your media is located. There is no moving things around. You can continue to utilize whatever you are currently using without issue. If you don't like it just tell Channels to stop monitoring those locations. For the most part it is a no harm no foul situation to test out.
This is very much a personal decision as everyone has different needs and preferences. I probably will never find an All-In-One. I prefer Plex for my long term main media server. Yes it is bloated and support has begun to suck the last decade, but I personally just like it as my main long term media server. I use the Arr family for my long term media file management (they are not just file finders, they are awesome organizers and renamers. And Bazarr is a must-have for anyone who requires or is addicted to subtitles.) ChannelsDVR of course is my hands down, no question about it, Live TV and DVR. No one can beat it. Excellent source options, excellent guide management, very good subtitle support, and completely exception support (really, how often do you find the people who wrote the software actually walking people though problem solving step by step.) And of course virtual channels and channel collections are brilliant game changers.
And of course I just now noticed the OP said they were going to go with what @maddox suggested. But I will still reply since I already wrote this up and someone might find it informative.
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I tried using only channels as my media server. The only problem I encountered is with Dolby Vision. Channels had a hard time playing them. Green and pink colors. Emby would play the same files without a problem. Everything else played great. Very good progress over the past year or so on this. I look forward to the day I can replace emby and plex and only use channels for all my media
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Since I do not need any advanced features etc, It works very well for me as a movie server.
Just over 24,000 recordings and imports in my database. The Channels DVR Collections feature, strmlnks, and the ability to edit metadata and import art provides a positive experience. But nothing is automatic. Even smart rules in collections require a basic understanding of database logic rules. Not hard, but you might need to try several different approaches to find what works for you. I am still learning and enjoying the experience.
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Is that what causes that color shift? Thanks!
Yes, Channels doesn’t support Dolby Vision. We’re hoping to get this in, but Apple does nothing to let third parties playback Dolby Vision easy. Even in their native player.
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I have tried but it doesn't work for me. I listen to a lot of foreign material and there is no multi languages support. You can't select the language audio nor the sub titles you want. Sub titles support is lacking in general, activating closed captioning with not activate any sub titles even if there is only one available.
If your content has the audio streams tagged with language codes, then they are represented in Channels; the same goes for subtitles. Personally I have never had problems with changing audio tracks or subtitles within Channels.
Without details, your singular case of inability to change audio/subtitles is an outlier. Please supply details so possibly your situation can be resolved.
Channels doesn’t have anything built in to ADD subtitles. It plays back all subtitles that your video content has great.
So it’s a sort of garbage in, garbage out kind of thing.
Adding a way to add subtitles from online sources is something we’d like to get in there soon.
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I mainly watch video on my M1 Mac using the ios app. I just test it on my iPad and AppleTV. It seems to be an issue on the Mac only. On the Mac, clicking Close Caption will only show an on/off choice instead of a list of languages to select.
Closed captions are different from subtitles. Closed captions are on/off, embedded subtitles are different; if your content has subtitles with language descriptors, then the list will show the language, too.
I would like to preface this as I love channels. But the things that stop it from being a unified streaming app for me are
*Lack of music
*Lack of photos
*Sorting through library
***In plex on the client i can sort content by any variable, year, added, studio, rating, ganre etc
*Automatic download subtitles
***About 70% of my imported content has subtitles, but for the things that don't is annoying
*Playback support.
***In plex I have never found video files that won't playback and give me AI Upscaling support at same time. In Channels DVR I have many imported content that only plays on software devoder. Thus limiting my ability to use AI upscaler
*Imported content matching.
***Channels does this good guessing 85% success rate. Plex does better and probably matched content 95% of time.
*Profiles (unique to each user)
All that being said. Channels is not plex. Im perfectly ok keeping them seperated. Channels was not set out with intention to be unified media center. It is however best damn cable cutting dvr.
Really the 2 things that i miss most is subtitles and how plex lets me sort my library.
Dude the list of sub titles languages is under Close Caption in the ui. The point is it does work on iPad and AppleTV but it is not on the Mac. It is a bug.
The “Mac app” is just the iPad app. There’s not much we can do about it, as any bugs are mostly from Apple’s system. We do nothing to make it work on the Mac. We just let people install the iPad app on M1 Macs though the App Store.
So it’s weird there’s a bug in something this simple.
We've begun using only Channels.. The only thing I really wish it did is access DVDs in ISO format, but the thing I have found that does that best is KODI. I did convert most of my DVDs to .MKV and pointed channels to it, so we rarely leave channels anymore, and it is working great.
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I still use both Plex and Channels. Honestly the only thing holding me back from getting rid of Plex is the ability to separate users. I share my media remotely with a couple of friends and parents. The ability to separate things makes my life easier.
We can set Channel Collections per client with the server side configurations. It would be nice to do the same with Library Collections. Then you could create collections per user/client device and create an ad-hoc per user view.
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OP Update: I ended up going all-in and plugged my RAID array (with all my media) into my Channels Pi. So far it is working quite well for me. I'm not terribly interested in a lot of customization, folders, etc. so I think it will suit me fine.
I only wish I could browse to all my drives from my computer. My Mac shows empty folders, Windows machines just flat out refuse to connect to it. I've even tried using several SFTP clients to ssh into it without success. I guess for now if I need to move media, etc. I'll unplug the drives and plug into my main machine. It's clunky but will work until I figure out the issue.