I have a summer cottage 300 miles away where I have decent internet access and a HdHomeRun OTA tuner installed. It works fine. I have a VPN from my main house to the cottage. I would like to record some of the OTA programming from the stations at the cottage at my main house. I can add the cottage HDHomeRun OTA tuner to my channels DVR just fine.. but the bandwidth requirements are beyond what my upload limits at the cottage will allow (10mbps).. So what I want is a very simple transcoding proxy server that appears to the outside world as a HDHomeRun OTA tuner and sits in the data stream and just transcodes MPEG-2 to H.264 using an Intel quicksync capable processor. I found the channels DVR development server project "wallop" in github, but that does more than I need. Is there any easy way to have a minimal proxy to chop the bandwidth of a remote HDHomeRun?
Why not just install a Channels DVR server at the remote cottage and remote connect to it, or connect directly to it through your VPN and set the bandwidth on your local client Channels app?
A channels client can only connect to ONE dvr server. So yes that is doable, except I will loose access to the DVR server at the main house.
Yep, same here. I have two local Channels DVR servers and can only connect to one at a time with a Channels client.
Was thinking you could use a Channels DVR server at the remote cottage as a proxy with the horsepower to transcode the OTA Mpeg2 and set your local client to use tuner sharing and adjust the bandwidth on the local client device.
Of course, there is the Extend, which is SiliconDust's OTA tuner that natively transcodes to H.264 on the fly.
The HdHomeRun Extend does an extremely crappy job of transcoding. Yes it works but, no it is barely watchable at 4mbps. Locast at the same data rate has a very decent PQ. If the extend had a setting to both deinterlace and compress to H.264 720p then that would be usable. It does not.
A Pi4 with ffmpeg and OMX blows the extend away for PQ. Cheap too. So a simple one stream transcoding proxy would be a super useful (to me anyway) app.
Ah, wasn't aware it was such poor quality.
Given your upload bandwidth at the remote cottage, that 'transcoding proxy' would have to be at your remote cottage to handle the OTA mpeg2 bandwidth in order to transcode it. If you don't want to use a Channels DVR server there, you could probably roll your own with ffmpeg or the like, but you still need a server over there.
A simple single stream transcoding proxy server at the cottage is what I am looking for. A Pi4 would work fine based on what that hardware seems to be able to do with the full channels server right now.
This won't help with live-streaming over the VPN, but what if you setup a DVR at the remote location, let it do the recordings, and then setup some kind of automation to transfer the recordings from the remote location to the local location, and then use Channel's new "import" feature to import the recording into a locally-running DVR??
If only some HDHomeRun simulator existed that is not written in GO 