In general, there is no limit to the number of recordings that Channels DVR can make at once. The DVR software places no artificial limits on how many recordings it can make simultaneously; the only limits you will run into will be either physical or network in nature.
The physical limits have to do with either your disk bandwidth and/or your network bandwidth. Channels will happily pull bits off the network and shove them onto your disks as quickly as it can. However, the more concurrent streams/recordings you have going at once may overwhelm your hardware, and bits may be dropped or lost because your hardware cannot keep up. Network bandwidth may also become a bottleneck as your DVR server needs to read each of the streams coming in to put them to disk. A full gigabit connection isn't likely to be saturated, but if you have 100Mbps segments between your tuners/gateway and your DVR serverâor worse yet, wirelessâthen you may find your server dropping packets because there is more bandwidth coming in than your network adapter can handle.
The network limitations only come into play if you have a restrictive ISP., and only when using TVE streams. The issue of "concurrent streams" imposed by networks may show up if you are recording from multiple channels from the same parent network, such as multiple Discovery networks, ie HGTV, Food, DIY, Discovery, MotorTrend, etc. Another place you may run into the issue of "too many streams" is if your cable provider sets a limit on how many networks it will authorize concurrently. (This latter situation is most likely familiar to anyone with Spectrum trying to initially setup TVE: trying to authorize too many networks too quickly will give errors.)
Separately, the question was raised in this thread about how best to keep your tuners' favorite/disabled channel lists in sync between the tuners, clients and DVR server. Presently, there isn't a very good method for this, but it is being worked on. You do need to realize though that presently it is broken down into 2 separate categories:
- The client apps â Each client maintains its own separate list of favorite/disabled channels, independent from everything else. When a client app is started for the very first time, this information is pulled from the tuners/DVR server; but after that initial startup, the settings are local to that individual client app.
- The DVR server/tuners â The DVR server and the physical tuners are always kept in sync with regard to the favorite/disabled status of channels. You can decide how to make those changesâwhether in your tuner's web UI, or from the DVR server's web UIâbut the result will be the same.
There are plans to revamp how the favorite/disabled status of channels is handled across the entire Channels platform, but it is in flux, and has yet to be finalized.
Additionally, there is the issue of keeping multiple HDHR tuners in sync. While this would ultimately be a nice feature to include in Channels, it presently is completely separate. If you are looking for a tool to use to to manage multiple HDHR tuners, I personally have used HDHRUtil to keep 3 Primes in sync. However, you are free to find your own tools manage this situation; just remember that it is not something that Channels handles.