Doesn't find the DVR

Recently, the Channels app on my Shield TV is not discovering the DVR on the network. It find my 3 tuners fine, but the DVR menu items just don’t appear initially - sometimes it takes several minutes for them to show up.

So that’s a big problem. Not sure if it’s a networking issue on my side, or what. But - I saw the options to manually add tuners by IP to channels. Why can’t we also add the DVR manually by IP? It would take the whole discovery guessing game out of the picture.

OK, so I figured out the IGMP snooping on my router was interfering with Bonjour. Disabled it. It seems fine now.

However, I still would suggest that a manual setting for the DVR IP address would be a good idea. For those of us with litterally NO apple devices at home, who therefore couldn’t care less about bonjour, all this is a bit of a hassle.

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This is not a function of the DVR service, per se. It is simply a service that runs on a host. It is the host’s configuration that determines the IP address.

In fact: The DVR service should not be allowed to mess with its host’s IP addressing.

I assume your router is providing DHCP for your LAN? Does it have a provision for specifying fixed IP addresses for specific MAC addresses? (I call that “static dynamic” addressing.)

I think you misunderstood. I am talking about providing the IP address if the server in the client. Not configuring the IP of the server in the server.

I have set DHCP reservations on my router for the DVR host. Its IP does not change, that’s why bonjour is really not necessary. I should be able to provide the IP of the server on the client config screen. The automatic discovery is neat but only when it works.

I’m having the same problem. I’ll be watching a DVR’d show, and I’ll lose connection to my DVR. On the recommendations row, all of my favorites will disappear, and Channels will make me “find my DVR” or connect to a remote DVR. After about a minute, it’ll reconnect and work. Is this the problem you were experiencing avdp? How exactly did you go about fixing that? I’m not sure my router has a setting for IGMP snooping.

Not exactly, no. My situation is that I’d start the channels app and none of the DVR menu option would be there - the discovery just didn’t work because of bonjour traffic getting blocked by an overly helpful router. I’ve never lost connection while watching.

Thanks for the reply. I disabled IGMP snooping on my router, and we’ll see if that works. Pretty sure something is blocking bonjour traffic on my network also. Like you said, it would be nice to be able to just specify the IP address to the server. I’m sure many people, like myself, have a static IP address for their server.

Do you guys have routers between your DVR and your streaming client device(s)?

Sorry, I should have said switches. While I do have a router (obviously) I also multiple switches.
But my impacted clients and server are all the same switch. The switch has IGMP snooping enables. Once I disabled it, the server became immediately visible to the clients.

Hmmm… I have IGMP snooping enabled on my NetGear ProSafe 5-port managed swiitch. In fact it’s the one into which my tuner and DVR NAS is plugged. (“Backbone” switch is unmanaged, currently.)

I have not experienced these problems so far.

I have 2 of those netgear 5-port switches and a 16-port one as well. It was not a problem for me for a long time, and these switches have been rock solid… It started suddenly. A little googling on IGMP snooping explains what it does - it blocks multicast traffic “intelligently”, and mDNS/bonjour announcements are multicast. Google “IGMP snooping” and “bonjour” and you’ll see if seems to be a fairly common problem.

There may be a less radical solution than disabling it - probably a complete network reboot would take care of it. I just didn’t feel like dealing with it. I honestly just would like to be able to specify the IP address of the server in the client configs, rather than rely on some auto-discovery which is completely unnecessary in my network (servers have static IPs).

More accurately: It attempts to “route” it intelligently, to avoid it being sent where it’s not needed.

For a lightly-loaded home network disabling it would give me no heartburn at all. I’d rather disable IGMP snooping than deal with having to manually enter the hostname, much less the IP address, of my DVR NAS. To each their own, however.