Is that one stream HD?
Yes the 9.0 issue makes it not so simple. Iām able to connect YouTube tv. I played with my friends account for a few days.
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Using the YouTube TV app directly, or adding it as a TVE Provider for Channels DVR? Because if it's the latter, the devs say that's not supported.
I donāt know if Iād trust it for a full time remote use like you need, but it works fine for occasional remote streaming with great quality. Within the house, Iāve never had an issue with transcoding. I have Channels hooked to an HomeRun HD with antenna input. It is a RPi 4, so it is the current top of the line (I thinkā¦)
I have an rPi3 running Homebridge at my primary home. I could replace that with a top of the line 4 and move the 3 to the remote home for Homebridge only. So thatās an optionā¦
When you say occasional streaming versus full-time, what differentiates the two? As long as I can get an HD stream that consistently looks great on a 75ā TV, thatās all I need.
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Iāve never tried remote to a large TV. Just my phone and iPad.
My Pi4 has Channels, HomeBridge and PiHole all running 24/7 and Iāve never had a hiccup with any of them.
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It's more of a question of bandwidth than proc power. As long as you have sufficient upstream at the source and sufficient downstream at the destination you can turn off transcoding and run the stream direct. I turn transcoding off on every device becuase I hate it. My cpu doenst budge at all when running multiple streams. I'm not on a Pi but it shouldn't make any difference. I guess I am old school and have always thought of the Pi as a science project and by the time you buy everything to set it up I could have bought a good used 5 year old PC that could blow it out of the water as far as processing power. Now where the Pi will suffer is commercial detection but if you arent in a hurry then you should be fine...
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After a gut check, I decided to just go ahead and order the DS220+. It wonāt fit in my entertainment cabinet, but there are other rooms with coax I can make work. The thing I cheaped out in is the storage. Rather than getting an SSD, I went for a classic HDD - the 4TB Seagate Ironwolf NAS HDD was $79 on Amazon, so I just pulled the trigger on that. The total cost is a little more expensive than Iād hope to spend, but Amazon is pretty good with returns.
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I'm running on a 918+ and it works very well for me.
Yes, the one remote stream the rPi 4 supports can be HD. For me, transcoding Comcast 720p/1080i channels from an HDHR Prime - which are a mix of MPEG-2 and h.264.
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Is there a table that details these capabilities for the various common systems in use? In the end I chose the DS220+ because I read in the forum that it was recommended and used by the Channels engineers themselves. Iām curious as to how many simultaneous HD streams that can transcode for remote viewing.
Not sure of the number but if max streams for transcoding but if it is important to you return that device and get a computer to run channels on. NAS devices can never compete with a traditional computer as far as proc power.
If you are looking for simple channels solution, starting out with a NAS solution ain't it.
Running on a NAS is a good solution you have both Storage and the Processor in 1 Place easy to maintain and does Hardware Transcoding so what is wrong with that. I run several servers on my NAS and never had a problem with it. You can run in raid In case of 1 drive failure your dvr will keep running.
...
OS
Synology DS1019+
Linux Alpine
3.14.0_alpha20210212 (kernel: 4.4.180+)
CPU
4 cores / Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU J3455 @ 1.50GHz
load averages: 4.94 2.48 1.08
RAM
15.48 GB
92.3% free
NET
1 interface
172.17.0.2
...
Well if it doesnāt work out, I can return it I guess. I assumed that a NAS would allow me to just set it somewhere without a monitor and run it headless with all setup and maintenance done through a web-based console. That seemed desirable as I donāt have a need for a desktop PC. I transitioned to Mac a while ago and my primary machine is a laptop.
You made a great choice for the DVR do not let others discourage you.
I agree. I have it running on a Qnap 653D and it's been rock solid. It's been so stable, I actually have to remind myself every now and then to update the Channels software. Plenty of space and processing power. Used it to record much of the Olympics from both my HDHR Prime and TVE with no issues.
Unless you're running pre-release versions of the DVR, there is no need to manually update; Channels will automatically update itself when new stable releases are available.
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I do run the pre-release version and never had any problem with stability. I know they update it almost every day so I try to catch the latest at least once a week or so.
For me, cheap and easy was just that!
I, like many folks, have a redundant/backup home network in place.
We use OneDrive to sync ALL of our folders>files to both the cloud and a backup PC near the TV. That PC is the source of our personal media we watch on TV. And we run Crashplan on it to backup ALL of our files to the cloud (redundancy). Thus if one of our hard drives fails, we have 1) copies on other drives in the home, 2) on OneDrive's cloud and 3) up to 15 versions of the file in the Crashplan cloud.
So it was CHEAP (PC near TV already existed) and EASY to add Channels DVR to that PC along with its own external drive.
My advice: if you don't already have some redundancy in your home network, leverage getting a separate PC to do both your home network redundancy AND run Channels DVR server.
A TRUE TWO-FER ! !
Apple TV + Mac mini.
I have been running Mac mini 2010 headless for a few years now. In addition to Channels DVR (including remote streaming) it is running Homebridge and an AlarmServer and it serves as a TimeMachine Server. I even had a Plex server at some point but no longer needed. It has 8GB of RAM, SSD + 2TB hard drive. Only needed to reboot for updates. Channels DVR has never crashed. It is very quiet, almost silent and consumes minimum electricity.
You can buy it used as little as $50 for 2010 model, but I would recommend 2012 model ($85) or even better Mac mini 2014 (just saw one on eBay was sold for $139) that actually supports the latest macOS Monterey. Just a week ago I have upgraded to 2014 and it screams...
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