Great work Devs and excited to see what you have planned for 2021

I've been running Channels DVR on an old full-size desktop PC since May. I finally got it moved over to something smaller I had laying around, a Gigabyte Brix ultra compact PC. It has 4 cores and 16GB RAM and Channels runs great on it.

Before hand, I did some performance testing between Linux and Windows. I installed Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Windows 10. The performance metrics I compared between them were transcoding and comskip processing time.

I had comparable performance between Ubuntu and Mint which is to be expected since Mint is based off Ubuntu. I could only get one transcode at a time with Linux. On Windows 10 I can transcode 2 streams at once. If I run 3 at a time, one of them will buffer every 15 seconds or so.

Comskip was pretty close on both Linux and Windows. I ran several tests, but Windows averaged about 1 minute faster processing each time.

I really wanted to run a Linux OS since I'm a big Windows guy and wanted to mess with Linux some more. As much as I wanted to use Linux, I decided to stick with Windows 10 for now. I know results WILL vary between hardware, but it seems Windows is a bit more optimized for my older hardware.

The performance wasn't going to be the main topic of my post. I really want to focus on how EASY (and fast) it was to migrate between each OS and going back my original PC between OS installations. I keep the database and recordings on my NAS. This made it easy to point the config to the NAS to restore each time. No need to copy any of the data around. The same would be if I had it on an external hard drive.

You guys have made a great product and I'm excited to see what new features you all have planned for 2021.

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