DVR: All programs (live and recorded) now being transcoded?

Channels DVR Server
#1

Over the past week or so I’ve noticed a pretty significant drop in video quality when watching TV via Channels on an ATV (I have seen this on both ATV4 and ATV 4K) . It’s primarily macroblocking and other compression artifacts. If I turn off “tuner sharing” and watch TV directly from the HDHomeRun instead of going through the DVR the image quality returns to normal.

The DVR Logs indicate that the video is now being transcoded. Is there anyway to disable this?
The web player settings have no effect and I have remote access turned off.

The server is running Ubuntu 16.04.3 with Channels DVR version 2017.10.13.2123.

Log snippet:
libva info: VA-API version 0.40.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
2017/10/14 15:32:00 [MPG] Stopping transcoder for ch715 from 192.168.86.56
2017/10/14 15:32:00 [TNR] Closed connection to XXXXXXXX for ch715
2017/10/14 17:22:03 [TNR] Opened connection to XXXXXXXX for ch588
2017/10/14 17:22:03 [HLS] Probing live stream for codec/bitrate took 524.413038ms
2017/10/14 17:22:03 [MPG] Starting transcoder for ch588 from 192.168.86.56 (encoder=h264_vaapi, resolution=0, deinterlacer=linear, bitrate=10000)

Thanks!

#2

Hi, can you check what version of the Channels app you’re running?

#3

I see it on the beta version (9.26.2324) and the regular version (3.0.2). Home Streaming is set to Original on the beta version. Thanks!

#4

Are you seeing the issue in 3.0.2?

If you upgrade to a newer testflight it should fix it in beta.

#5

Upgrading to 3.0.3 should also fix the problem

#6

I’m going to fix the next build of the DVR so it works as expected with the older app versions as well.

#7

Thanks for the quick response. I should have checked the TestFlight version first. It works as expected there. It’s also fine in 3.0.3. It didn’t update automatically for some reason. Weird.

Thanks again. We’ve been using Channels with the DVR quite a bit in our home. It’s a great piece of software.

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