My wife doesn’t care for the shows I pull from CW’s DC-verse. She does, however, record a lot of cooking and travel shows from PBS. We’d be quite happy to have the two never meet on any device except the Apple TV.
My son would do well to have his own bucket as well, and I’d like to be able to approve certain shows or episodes for him (even if that just means I’m tagging it and he can only see a filtered list by that tag; that’s how I do it in Plex today so that’s fine).
I have a friend who is out of the country for a while. I’d love to be able to “gift” him a tuner on my device (either one tuner of one HDHR or a whole HDHR) and let him schedule whatever he wants, presuming it’s not already scheduled. He’d get a view with just those shows (not strictly, but by default – not expecting security in this, just defaults).
I think the biggest use scenario for me is recording management. I have people in the house that watch the same shows but not always at the same time so knowing where I am versus where another person is at both during a specific episode as well as which episodes each of us has watched would be nice.
Additionally, I see this as very beneficial for deleting recordings. Again, there are some shows that multiple people watch but not always together so it would be nice to have a way to say which users watch a particular show and once the watched status is set for all the users that watch that show it can either be deleted by the user or maybe as part of the recording menu there is a choice to auto-delete an episode/show once all users have watched it.
I think those are the big ones for me, I hate accidentally deleting something that I didn’t realize someone else wanted to watch, but I also agree with having parental controls and not seeing things that others record that I don’t care about.
I would love multi-user support. For me, it would be mostly for remote access. I don’t necessarily want to give my daughter my username/password (I sign in with google) for her to be able to see content on her iPad / iPhone remotely. Sure, I can type it in, but it occasionally asks for it again which can be a hassle.
And then being able to tag a show or content suitable for different users.
Use case: separate channel favorites per user / profile. When I log in the guide reflects MY favorites vs wife’s favorites. This wasn’t a huge issue with OTA channels only, but with TVE channels this will be essential. I don’t want to see Oxygen and Hallmark in the guide, wife doesn’t want to see all my sports channels. Kids only want Disney, Nick, cartoon, etc...
I would also like to see a simple user profile implementation. For my purposes, simply implementing additional favorites ("Jay's favorites", "Nancy's favorites", etc) would be a great start. User-specific views of the recordings would be my next priority.
My use case is to enable my wife to find her TV channels and recordings without having to search though my mom's voluminous catalog of recorded shows. If we had young kids living with us, I'd also like to be able to make at least one kids view.
I'm currently implementing this by running two instances of Channels DVR on my media server. One of them is running in a Hyper-V instance, and it seems perfectly happy. This will result in duplication, but I have the disk space for it (for now).
very disappointed to hear this. the logic that everyone in a household from 1yr old up to 100yrs old has the same preferences/interests in entertainment absolutely blows my mind. mulituser support of any type would majorly declutter the interface and make it far easier to browse for just the content i'm interested in
any updates to this roadmap? want my parents to be able to log in without my username and password. I take password sharing seriously and really like to avoid it.
In all fairness, they should have their own Channels Plus subscription and set up as Channels is designed for single families at home, not for infinitely sharing outside of your home.
Bumping this again to see if this feature has made it onto the roadmap. I have no intentions of sharing Channels outside my home, but my husband and I have drastically different TV preferences. Being able to customize our guide and compartmentalize our recordings would make our lives much easier!
I keep looking for a roadmap or some update on multi-user support. I cancelled my subscription for that reason. I needed jmulti-user and the solution to connect channels DVR to plex was janky.
There isn't one. Last i saw posts here, and in the many other threads going back years, they have no plans to add "profiles" or any sore of multi-user support.
A "workaround" solution already exists and many already implemented it. Have multiple servers setup, one for each user. I have 2 RPi4's running for years. Others i read use multiple Docker containers or something like that. It is tedious, and some work to setup initially, but after that, very little maintenance needed.
Agree 100% with speedingcheetah
I've been satisfied using Channels DVR for 4+ years.
I make my requests and if I don't forsee it happening I find workarounds if I want it bad enough.
And I'm still here using Channels DVR.
I run 4 Channels DVR Servers and can now access them all remotely using tailscale.
I still haven't found a solution that beats Channels DVR.
You don't need multiple servers to have multi-user anymore, so long as only one user is using a specific streaming device or you don't mind users on the same device scrolling past other people's content. This can all be accomplished with Collections, Smart Rules, and Server Side Settings!
Create a Channels Collection to determine what stations are available:
Use Server Side Settings to assign the Channels Collection per device:
Similarly, you can create a Library Collection for recorded/imported content:
And again, if you slap a Label on a Library Collection, you can use Server Side Settings to assign which ones are available or excluded from each device:
You can also use Smart Rules to automatically populate the Library Collections based upon whatever criteria is appropriate:
You can even assign custom art to Library Collections so it is obvious who it belongs to. Here's an example of mine:
As stated before...
... the same can be said about this solution. But it is what I have done and now has almost zero maintenance, so I am happy with this workaround solution. I have devices that are tailored to individual users, and I have ones for multiple users, and everything is easy peasy.
My multi-user use case is also for remote access. Not thrilled about sharing username/password and would like other remote user to authenicate separately.
I was referring to streaming channels away from home, not accessing shared content like Plex. Instead of running multiple instances of Channels DVR, I guess a workaround is to create a shared google login just for Channels DVR/tailscale or am I missing something?
