[EXPERIMENTAL] DVR server on SHIELD Tube, etc

Downloaded the app on my android TV. Haven’t tried it yet. Would my TV have to always be on? I’m looking at ways to move my server from my computer to something else.

Good question. I'm not sure if that TV turns off completely or just goes to sleep.

I guess I can be the guinea pig. I would assume I could just plug in a USB flash drive for the storage. I know my USB ports don’t go to sleep because I tried plugging my bias lighting and it always stayed on. I’ll be trying it on a Sony 900 F. I already have a server running on my computer so do I just need to set up a second server and sync it with my TVE accounts?. I hope YouTube TV works because that is my main provider

EDIT: all I get is it showing me a network server that is active even though I shut down the computer that was running the server. I can’t get past that screen

OK, got it up and running on the Sony TV with the HD homerun. About to test if I can log into TV anywhere and then turn off the TV and it still work on my iPad or iPhone. Will report what I find. So far, so good. The only issue I’m having is trying to get the storage the point to my external flash drive rather than to internal storage.

UPDATE: we have success on a 2019 model Sony android TV!. I was able to add four sources including my HD homerun and YTTV. Everything seems to be working perfectly even when I turn off my TV and it goes into standby mode. Thank you for opening this up for us! Now, I don’t have to use my laptop anymore than my wife primarily users. And I can check on my server and TV sources from my iPad

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Everything seems to be working great. However, there is one issue with the DVR location. In the channels settings it only shows internal storage spaces. I cannot get to find the USB stick I have in the TV. The TV does recognize it. Do I need to post this somewhere else or leave it here since it is part of the experimental server discussion?

Can you click Help > Submit Diagnostics. Did you format the disk as removable or adopted?

Log sent. The TV only let me format the USB drive as FAT32 and I didn’t see any other option though.

FAT32 won't let you record more than 4GB at a time. Weirdly in the diagnostics I'm not seeing any extra storage directories like expected. Can you take some screenshots of the storage settings on the TV and email [email protected]

Email sent. I may be wrong about the FAT32 but I had already formatted the USB drive. Every time I try to add a location for DVR I don’t see any external sources, only internal

I’m just using this 8 GB Kingston flash drive to see how it works. I plan on upgrading to a larger flash drive once I know we can get shows recorded to an external flash drive

I just wanted to follow up on this topic again today to let everyone know that the server is working great on a 2019 model Sony android TV. I turned off the TV last night and it went into standby but the channels app still worked on my phone last night and this morning. The only issue I’m having is getting the server to recognize the external storage on the TV. Currently, I have an older Kingston 8 GB 2.0 USB flash drive. However, I’m picking up a SanDisk 3.0 256 GB flash drive from Best Buy today. Does anyone have step-by-step directions on how to add this to the TV so that the channel server recognizes it? I also wanted to thank the channels team for making this possible. This is a much better option for us than having it on our computer.

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I have a Sony Android TV and i am unable to find the DVR server on the play store. I have play store version 20.0.45-xhdpi [8] [PR] 310435668

I was able to add a USB hard drive and it only shows 256mb of a 4tb drive :slight_smile:

Any ideas? Thanks

Maybe you can send to your TV from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.getchannels.dvr

Thank you @tmm1 I did try that but it says it no compatible with my device, see pic:

I have ran all of the system updates on the TV as well.

Download Channels DVR Server apk and the install it using adbLink's install apk feature.

https://apkpure.com/channels-dvr-server/com.getchannels.dvr

http://www.jocala.com

I factory reset the tv and then I was able to reinstall the DVR server. Thanks for the help. Now I have to figure out why the 4TB drive is only formatting as 271GB :slight_smile:

Try formatting on a computer first as exFAT

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I moved over to the Nvidia Shield Tube today from my old 2010 iMac. Interesting to see how this goes.

My Setup:

  • Shield Tube connected to Gig-E to the same network as the HDHomeRun Prime3
  • 256 Gig - High Endurance Samsung SD Card - ExFAT formatted

Tweaks:

  • Turned on Fan Mode to COOL from Quiet to keep the air flowing
  • Turned off Low power mode to keep it from throttling back for now

Migrated my config over by copying the iMac Channels data folder over to the SD Card in a NVIDIA_SHIELD/CHANNELS folder so that the DVR app can read/write. I had to reboot the shield with the SD Card in the tube to get writes to work.

Did a backup of the configs for sources and passes for the iMac and used /restore to bring in my config.

So far so good. Will keep an eye on it. But hopefully this ends up being better than worrying about the death of my old iMac :slight_smile:

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Cool, thanks for sharing!

I did some tests on FireTV Cube 2019 and the results were not so great. If I format my USB as ExFAT and insert it, there's an "unsupported file system" message shown and it forces me to format at FAT32:

Unfortunately FAT32 is no good for DVRs, because it forces a max file size of 4GB. So after about 30-60min of recording, it will start to fail.

I also saw a lot of the same "permission denied" issues as @Jason_Trippe trying to select the external storage in the DVR. I am looking into a proper fix for that.

Keep up the great work. One thing I know I’m going to miss is on my iMac I had a crown job that did the DVR update url to make sure I was on the latest beta build checking a few times a day. I really wish there was a flag to do that in the UI itself for the early access beta builds once you take one “keep updated to latest in the current bata channel” you do a few builds a day when busy and often tweak it alongside client builds so it would be nice to make sure we are running the same bits client and server as intended. Have you considered it?

Maybe I’ll find a cron like app for Android

The check doesn't have to be made on the device running the server. You can ask the server to query for updates by sending the request from any computer. You can create a cronjob on your desktop (or a scheduled task of using Windows) and ask it to run daily.