Fastest Hardware for DVR Server

Channels DVR Server
#1

I am currently a Tivo Roamio OTA user but seriously considering jumping ship over to Channels DVR. I am trying to figure out the absolutely best hardware to use for the server. After spending several hours digging through forum posts I don't see any post comparing performance and ease of maintenance for the different DVR server platforms options.

Right now I am considering a new M1 Mac mini or a Pi4. But I would love to hear which hardware you guys would recommend and why.

My priority is a very fast server running on low power. I want to make sure on my clients like Apple TV 4K that I can get the fastest performance for all things like starting a stream or seeking with thumbnails, etc. I also want the commercial skip processing can happen pretty fast.

I care about low power because I don't want much heat generated and I want to reduce or eliminate fan noise as much as possible. I also want to make sure I can use hardware acceleration for all features including hardware deinterlacing. Also the ease is making sure the server stays up and updated is important to me too.

What hardware do you guys recommend for running the DVR server?

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Advice on best DVR server for com skip and low maintenance setup?
#2

Great questions, but to get the best advice, please also describe your streaming needs, how many users, etc.

#3

Whether or not you want remote access for multiple streams is a big deciding factor. There is also a pretty big price difference. I'd start with the Pi, and then you can always move it if your needs grow and repurpose the Pi.

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#4

Hi Chris,
I go back to the earliest TiVos, and every model up thru Bolt in two of our homes, and my daughter's. With Channels most of the noticeable speed comes from the client -- a Shield Pro snaps thru commercial jumps while a Fire 4K sort of slides thru them. After switching to Channels DVR I used an i7-7700 on Win 10 with RAID 2TB drives, but windows is a pain -- you never know when an Windows update with mess up your server. And the complication of all the involved hardware was decidedly NOT like a TiVo box. But the upside is I no longer needed a 2nd unit at the summer house -- I just stream from our main house. My simple, quiet, low energy and self-maintaining update has recently been a QNAP TS-251D with 4TB RAID and 2 .m2 SATA SSDs in RAID0 for the Channels Streaming directory only (on the optional internal .m2 card). Either a J4025 dual core or J4125 quad will give you all the speed you can use for basic channels functions due to the efficiency of Linux, and the late generation QuickSync on-board video will handle transcoding and deinterlacing to 4K with no load on the main CPU. It just sits there, with all the efficiency of Linux, quietly doing everything in one small box. I should have done this first crack. The other night we had 3 OTA recording and a TVE recording at the same time, and everything went off without a hitch or delay. And commercial skipping is the only way to watch network football -- less than 10 minutes after the game is over you are good to go commercial free.

The new Raspberry Pi 4 approach looks good, but it's just as complicated as a PC, and less powerful that a higher-end NAS.

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#5

Most of the time it will just be local network streaming to our single Apple TV 4K. It will all be done over a wired network. Down the road I can see there likely being a second tv or an iPad that is streaming content locally off the server.

Right now we do not have remote access streaming with the Tivo so my expectation are that it will be utilized rarely. Once COVID dies down and IF I got back to a traditional office building then I might use remote access every one in a while. But I do want to have enough horsepower to at least handle doing 1 remote stream at the highest bitrate possible.

I got the sense from other posts that the Pi4 DVR server software has been optimized to use hardware acceleration. However, after digging through reddit, forum, and YouTube posts for hours I have not really seen anywhere that compares the speeds of the different server platforms.

Can you give any insight into whether there would be any perf difference between an M1 Mac and Pi4 for doing things like starting a stream and especially seeking within a video or skipping commercials?

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#6

Would the Pi4 really be just as complicated as a Win PC?

I got the sense that it would be less hands on than Windows. In fact, I would think it should be similar to a NAS because they are both running Linux.

However, I have not learned yet what the update experience is like on the Pi4 load.

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#7

I also forgot to add to the other extra details that I plan on using a 4 tuner box.

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#8

Pretty basic setup, is a Shield Pro out of the question? Would add another streaming device into the mix. Otherwise, just go with the rPi4, and if your needs grow, adapt with new hardware accordingly, and repurpose the pi.

#9

There are so many things to consider here.

For instance, do you care if one day all of your recordings disappear? If not, then you don't need any sort of redundancy.

Do you work at home? If so, believe it or not running Channels on your primary PC might be your most cost effective option as it pertains to power consumption. Because if you work 12 hours a day, but are only awake 16, running Channels on a primary workstation would only require 4 additional hours of electric use on a machine that's probably quite powerful.

Does transcoding matter? How often do you watch things on your phone or tablet?

You'll have to me more specific as the things you're after are completely relative. I can still remember back in my early 20's when I sold PC's over the phone. One of my customers said the words "I can't see why anyone would ever need more than 4mb of ram." A visionary he wasn't, lol. But the point is we all have different needs and expectations. Powerful with low power consumption could mean anything from a Raspberry Pi with a fast SSD to a Xeon L processor with an NVME array.

My personal opinion? Start with an Nvidia Shield running as a server. As far as I know it's the Android box with the beefiest processor and can handle transcoding. Plug in a 1tb SSD and it would be a great start. The beauty of that solution is if you realize you need a more elaborate system you'll at least have a great TV box you can use on one of the sets in your home. If you find it's too slow out of the box just run the system reset and return it.

#10

Although the M1 mini certainly has plenty of power, I'd probably avoid that for now since they are so new and using it as a media server is a bit off the primary use case so IF you run into any issue, it might not be a quick fix if it needs something that is outside the developers here. But it is officially supported.

Personally, my use case isn't a huge bit different from yours. We have a couple of Apple TVs and a couple of Android TVs and also watch some on iOS. I'm running Channels DVR on an old 2012 Mac Mini that I had in the closet being unused. It was the cheapest model when it was originally bought... 2.5Ghz i5. The RAM was upgraded to 10GB for other reasons in the past, and main drive SSD. I have 3 x 10TB USB3 external drives dedicated to Channels DVR, and 2 x quad tuner HDHRs (total 8 tuners). For sources, I currently have OTA via an attic antenna, Philo, and Pluto... and sometimes we share a YoutTubeTV source that is my daughters. I have seen it doing 12 simultaneous recordings before, as well as processing recordings for commercial skip and serving up streams to the TVs. It seems to handle whatever is thrown at it without much of an issue. The Mini is also running Docker for Pluto and Plex, but Plex isn't used much.

I too used a Roamio as my last of many Tivos before jumping ship several years ago. One thing I'd caution you about with Channels is that if you are doing a lot of OTA recording, it doesn't handle tuner conflict as gracefully as a Tivo. If you run out of tuners with recordings, there is no quick and easy way to tell it to stop one of them so you can watch live TV if it runs out of tuners. You'd have to go into the recordings and manually stop something. That didn't pass the wife test for me so I just bought another HDHR to give me 8 tuners and never have that happen.

My setup runs very well most of the time. Occasionally I've had to reboot the Mini. It isn't often enough to spend the time trying to diagnose.

If I were starting off fresh with Channels right now, I'd probably look for a more recent Intel Mac Mini. Hard to beat for performance and very easy to work with. A NAS box may provide more disk redundancy, but the processors in them are usually pretty weak in comparison to a Mini, and they are a lot more expensive for the same compute power. I'm no that worried about spending a lot of money to avoid ever losing anything, but if that's important then something to consider. Of course you could also just use a RAID device as backup and still run it on a Mini.

The only other thing I'd mention is that my HDHRs are on the same switch with the Mini, but all the Apple TVs, Android TVs and iOS devices are on Wifi via an Orbi.

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#11

Personally I run mine on a Synology DS218+. It’s a very popular platform for a server, based on dev comments over the years. It runs great, and with two disk bays I have redundancy so if a disk fails I can hot swap it. If cost is not a big concern I feel like it’s a great solution. Plus you get all the other features the NAS can provide. They have come out with a newer model now as well, I believe, the DS220+.

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#12

I am using an Intel Nuc 5i5BNH as my home server with Ubuntu 20.04. I am running on it OpenVPN client, Asterisk PBX, Tvheadend tuner with Oscam, Time Machine server for all my macs and, of course, the DVR Server. I am using the Apple TV 4K as my Channels client.

With such setup, the overall experience is extremely fast and fluid with no lag at all. I can record and zapping channels at the same time my VPN is getting the tv streams from my second house using AES-GCM encryption. CPU load is never higher than 20%. About real-time transcoding of an HD channel, as the Intel Nuc has hardware GPU video acceleration, CPU load is never higher than 25%. So, 25% + 10% of the VPN = 35%

Power consumption is low: 12 watt when I am watching an HD channel on my tv (using USB satellite tuners). 10,72 watts when using remote stream using vpn

That said, you could buy an Intel Nuc i3 with 8gb ram and you will be set for a long, long time. It will also allow you to expand services in the future.

#13

I am wondering how you are determining whether a Pi4 would be slower than a high end NAS. If you comparing on a pure CPU perf basis that might be true but a lot of the biggest improvements in perf in processors these days comes from purpose built hardware accelerators. That is a big reason why Apple silicon is so fast because it has specialized hardware for certain tasks that frees up more cycles for the CPU.

Is it truly known that a Pi 4 is less powerful than a high end NAS for a Channels DVR server?

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#14

Right now no because I already use up 7 HDMI ports on my AV receiver. We got several gaming consoles, 4k bluray player, etc. We already have two other streaming boxes, a 2020 Roku Ultra and a 2020 Chromecast with Google TV. I don’t really want to add another box especially since I got the Chromecast because it supports YT HDR with VP9.2 codec and the latest Nvidia Shield did not support VP9.2.

I am aware that there is no client app for Roku. But I can potentially use the new Chromecast as a client too.

#15

See: How A Raspberry Pi 4 Performs Against Intel's Latest Celeron, Pentium CPUs - Phoronix

#16

Maybe I missed this somewhere above, but as others have said elsewhere, try to go with hardwired gigabit ethernet between all the critical components. Someone once told me that Input / Output (I/O) is the bottleneck of most data processing so a very fast network is important and consider going with SSD if it is in your budget for initially storing the video files even if moved to spinning disk later. Fortunately Channels makes it easy to span disks and directories for storing recordings.

I've used the Channels DVR server on both a Windows 10 laptop and on the RPi4 and Commercial Detection seemed a lot slower on the RPi4. (Hmm, just remembered my laptop has an SSD and the Pi is using external spinning disk, so that likely contributes to some of the additional time for Commercial Detection on the Pi).

I am on the custom RPi4 image now but am looking at going to some more powerful hardware and running either Windows 10 Pro (to delay / block unplanned updates) or maybe Mac or Ubuntu.

#17

Comskip is still kinda slow on the Pi. Everything else is pretty speedy.

If you really want the absolute fastest hardware, go with the M1 which will run circles everything else.

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#18

Ah this is really good to know!

For the macOS server I read somewhere (I don’t remember exactly where since I have read so much lately) that you have to kind of be careful making sure the server stays up. It sounded like that you had to make sure you are logged in with your user account to ensure the server stays running.

I remember seeing instructions for how to make Channels DVR server run as a background service but then I think it also said that it disabled some hardware acceleration features. I would want to make sure OS updates or Channels server updates do not interrupt things. I don’t know yet how the update process is like for the macOS client and whether it updates automatically on its own.

What are you recommendation for the best way to setup the mac client so it stay up as much as possible?

#19

If you want it totally hands-off, you can set it up to auto-login without password requirement on boot and with file encryption off.

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#20

I second the recommendation of an Intel NUC running Ubuntu. Get the full height version and put in a second SATA drive (or SSD) for storing the recordings.

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