Ah, cool. I’m not sure that the new Channels Live TV app will offer me anything extra though? Plex DVR plays live tv “relatively” well - has the odd glitch etc… and guide is rubbish until they bring out the new grid style guide.
Just weighing up my options, since the whole Channels set up isn’t exactly cheap for what is usually a free service in the U.K. therefore need to make sure it will all do what I need!
All family members have iPads too, so if I switch from Plex then obviously that’s another £14.99. All adds up, so I’d hope for a Rolls Royce experience!
I’m curious… the AppleTV app has almost no buffering when changing a channel. Were you able to accomplish the same with Android TV and Fire TV? The one thing I didn’t like about Plex was the buffering for live channels.
All the Channels apps play the streams from the HDHomeRun natively, providing a 1 second tuning time. Plex has to transcode the streams which causes multiple seconds of delay before you’re watching your channel.
Channels provides the closest experience to what you expect when watching TV as you can get. That’s what it’s always been about. You’ll think you’re on your old cable box, except it feels nicer!
I tested the beta version on the Fire TV Gen 2 and it worked fine on my DVB streams for both H264 and MPEG2. I note you have only released this for the Gen3 box. Have you personally tried a Gen2 box? I appreciate there is no hardware deinterlacing for MPEG2 but on standard definition streams it looked fine. I do have a Gen3 but I don’t like it very much. Could you consider supporting Gen2? Or if not supporting at least offering an unsupported version with a clear warning that MPEG2 streams might not be optimal?
BTW congrats on releasing this and I hope the revenue it generates secures a great future for FancyBits.
One further question…
Am I best to run the DVR on the Shield TV with an external HDD, or on my Windows Server which runs Plex Server?
If on Windows I’d probably have to wrap it in a service, using NSSM or something, as I don’t always log into it after a reboot.
Cheers!
Best to run it on Windows. Most of us haven’t been successful at getting it to stay running on the Shield and have different issues after a few days.
Perfect. I wonder why Plex doesn’t do the same. Would seem like that should be the standard. Oh well. We have Channels and that’s good enough for me!
The windows installer for the DVR has an option to install as a service built-in.
Hmm… I didn’t see that option… I used NSSM which worked fine.
May uninstall at some point and do a reinstall.
Just discovered Channels and LOVE it, you have a winner on your hands for sure. Probably should have read the fine print here, but it looks like I cannot record or view recordings from inside the Andriod app (only on the web interface). You mention this will come online later this year, are we talking weeks, months, Q2, Q3, or perhaps Q4?
Asking developers for dates?!
We can’t promise anything, but we’d be disappointed in ourselves if the full DVR experience wasn’t there by sometime in the summer.
The good news is, I think we’ve decided we’ll do a slow roll out of features instead of holding all of them until it has 100% DVR support. The first would be being able to browse your recordings and playing them back.
So if you want to start using Channels DVR now and utilize something else for playback, eventually you’ll be able to play them back directly in Channels. Then you could just suffer through using the web admin for scheduling, which isn’t toooo bad. And then of course you’d get scheduling and management support inside of Channels.
We think doing it in phased roll outs will be better for the product and for everyone that uses Channels.
Agree with this approach (DVR playback ASAP please!.. scheduling later)…can always use our iPhones to schedule rather than web interface. Most of us usually have these damn devices in hand or nearby when watching TV anyway…
After a live show ends it’s been kicking me back out to the guide. Beta version would just keep playing live channel. Hoping this is just a glitch?
I just noticed it’s more of an Apple TV port rather than a native designed Android app.
Btw can I join on your design team, and help you design your apps. I want to fix the TV experience too. I am very fluent in Material design
You must be talking about the Fire TV app? I haven’t seen the Fire TV app, but I use the Android TV app all the time and I love the design of it. It is completely different from the Apple TV app, and I like the Android style vertical navigation much more than the TVOS style horizontal navigation. But in both cases I feel the developers did a great job designing for what users of each platform would expect.
Should I assume there will be a Channels Channel for the Shield in the near future?
Is there a free channels DVR fire tv app like there is on the apple tv?
Yes, all of our apps are available as free downloads that only work while you're an actives Channels subscriber.
Search for "Channels dvr" on your appropriate app store.