It is a low watt mini PC with a 7th generation processor.
None of the problems you mentioned. I is my daily driver pc and does all the server and docker stuff while I am editing music/movies/tv and surfing the net and such. Sometimes having two sports simultaneously, one on mini pc, and another channels dvr. It has a fan but is silent because of the speed.
Deskmini 110 that was $100 plus processor, $50, and memory, don't remember $...
I recently switched to a Pi4 from running it on my desktop PC so that I could dual boot to windows without taking down the DVR. As others have noted, comskip has been the only significant slowdown and I only noticed it last night because I typically don't watch anything until hours (or days) after recording. It looks like it took 15 min to run on an hour long, OTA show (while also recording another show.) Skipping ahead is slower now too, but still faster than it was last year before I built my new PC. If the new PC hadn't spoiled me for the last few months, I'd have been stoked with the current performance.
Generally simpler and lower power is good if you don't see your needs expanding. The all in one box option (essentially an appliance) that runs Ubuntu is two thumbs up. From there a NUC is a bit more(not much) complicated but may provide some flexibility and a bit of expandability. My route (which probably is not good for you - this will use power) was to wait for a good deal on a dell server. Powerful processing with a lot of expandability on a lot of areas (power, HDMI, RAM, Disks, pci). To add to that option's complication is I run it in a VM (VMWare) environment. But VM allows for extremely easy work, maintenance, backup to be done on the Channels DVR guest VM instance.
I, too, have the OTA and switched to Channels. I highly recommend the NAS solution as the NAS can perform several other functions and runs 24/7 anyway.
I was a Roamio OTA/Mini user for many years but recent issues with sluggishness in the newer OS and black screens on the Mini’s drove my family crazy.
I’m running Channels on a QNAP-TS253D NAS with 2 3TB Hard drives. My hard wired clients are all either AppleTV Gen4’s or 4K’s as well as a couple of wireless iPad’s. Wired client connections are all 1Gb and the NAS is connected with a 2Gb port channel.
This setup works great. The NAS has no problem with transcoding or commercial skip. Best of all my family has no issues with the Channels UI which was my biggest concern coming from many years of Tivo use.
I agree with the NAS option. quiet and set and forget. I use a QNAP NAS with a Intel proc, although Synology has great units also. go with a NAS that is natively supported by Channels
on the low end, an arm based NAS with one drive would be a very good dvr box, if your needs/budget warrant, you could go with a multi Bay nas with a Intel processor for superior trancod8ng performance
+1 for the Synology DS218+
Have messed around with other servers before but this has proved very low maintenance and works flawlessly.
It sounds like I have a pretty similar requirement to you. My home network and strong wifi if you can’t wire has proved the only bottleneck.
I am ready to go all-in on Channels DVR and need to implement a permanent solution for the DVR server.
I have a HDHR Quatro with 41 channels, 177 channels via TVE and 283 channels from Pluto via docker. I am starting with one 8tb hard drive, but may need another eventually. I will also use this to serve movies via the library from another networked hard drive (hopefully). The DVR will be hard wired and most, if not all clients will be wireless. I have gigabit internet, but regularly only pull about 500mbps down and about 35mbps up.
I will be feeding 3 TVs in the house (one Sony Android TV and two via AFTV), two android phones (Galaxy s20) and three android tablets (Amazon Fire Tablet) while out and about. The goal is to also have my parents in another state using this as their primary TV source via up to 3 Apple TVs in their house and something else in the RV (another Apple TV, AFTV or just a phone). They will also possibly be accessing via Apple Phone/Tablet and a Samsung phone. I need to be able to serve all of this if at all possible. All will have the streaming quality set to 'Original' as much as possible, but transcoding capabilities will be a must.
I have already ruled out the Pi4 as it is just not powerful enough for all of the away from home viewing. Reading through this thread and others, I really think my best solution is either a Synology DS218+ or a M1 Mini Mac. We are heavily leaning towards the Apple M1 Mini Mac because I want to make sure it can handle anything we throw at it.
Thanks in advance for all of your help!!
With the possibility of multiple concurrent transcodes I would suggest going with the M1 mini, it’s a beast.
do you have any data caps on that gigabit internet service? the remote viewing resolution also might be sub par for multiple concurrent streams. The Mac Mini will crush on the processing side but the 35 Mbps upload would be your bottleneck - do you get better upload speeds over ethernet?
I do not have any data cap (unlimited data). However, the 35mbps is the advertised upload speed for now. Cox is in the process of upgrading my area to fiber and then I will have symmetrical internet (gig up/gig down). Until then, I agree that I will likely only be able to stream 2, maybe 3 external streams at once.
I've used an early 2009 Mac Mini to run Channels for 18 months and it has been working fine. I often record many things at once and never have problems playing locally. Watching remotely on my iPhone or iPad works well too.
So I imagine any newer Mac Mini would be perfect.
Unlimited data is very important for what you are wanting to do. I go well what a cap would be with the number of recordings I'm doing, and I'm not doing any viewing outside the house. I would also go with an M1 Mac Mini for what you described. I'm using an old Mini and its been great up until just recently something has been off.. I think its sorted now with help from the forum and developers, but what I realized in doing the diagnosis was the processing for commercials is taxing to it... the M1 should be able to fly through that better than any alternative platform.
Can anyone comment on performance using a Mac Mini 2010 - 2012 model, I plan to purchase one to use as an AirMessage server.
You should take a look at this thread...
https://community.getchannels.com/t/dvr-on-mac-mini-2012-tips-wanted
This is really solid info that has pretty much sold me on getting one off eBay.
I suppose the real question in my head is how much better will it be than my SHIELD.
I'm also a Synology fan. It just works. What I didn't like about running the DVR on my Mac Mini is because I used my Mac Mini as my daily driver. I moved it to the Synology so I didn't have to worry about downtime because I need to reboot or whatever. The Synology is set it and forget it really. I use a DS1019+.
Likewise, my Mac Mini has no display, keyboard, or mouse, and is just sitting on a shelf running (sitting next to two QNAP NAS boxes). So I think your specific use case is that running Channels DVR on a multi-purpose machine presents downtime issues, not that its a Mac Mini.
If I ever get a MacBook Air I’ll turn my Mac mini Mac into a server.