When you say “priority” is there any estimate or target set for the first US Alpha or Beta ie 3months, 4months etc?
And is there a similar estimate that can be given for the UK?
Or are we looking at 12-18months timescales?
No estimates yet… there’s a ton of work in writing a full blown DVR from scratch, and it’s very hard to predict which parts will take how long.
I will say though, Channels did not exist at all 6 months ago. When the first version was released, it didn’t support legacy devices, didn’t support DVB guide data, didn’t work with mpeg4 streams, didn’t have play/pause. Now all of those features and more exist, and we have thousands of happy users using Channels every day.
We started development on Channels DVR only a few weeks ago, but things are moving quickly and we are already using it for our own personal recordings. Once we’ve finished the base set of features, we will start the beta program. And once the major bugs are fixed through beta testing, we will start adding support for more countries.
Thanks for the information. Status information/ communication with the community is important. Providing frequent progress information, even with less than great progress, is better than the way SD has handled it. SD’s silence has caused a loss of confidence that they will produce anything workable.
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In the UK we have to pay around £150 a year for a licence to own a TV. Yes that’s right my none UK friends, UK viewers have to buy a licence in order to own a TV. It’s crazy.
However this may help channels out. I’ve found various free apps in the UK that have a grid guide which covers 7 days worth of TV viewing. I think they can use the grid guide here for free as the BBC (who charge us for the TV licence) make the grid guide and guide data open source here as we’ve already paid for it.
I’ll PM a few shots of the apps that do it if anyone from channels wants to investigate this? I maybe wrong, but if I’m right, can we have a discount in the uk lol
Yep i can second this - apps like tv player https://tvplayer.com and TV Catchup http://www.tvcatchup.com are some examples
In Australia icetv.com.au is one of the strongest players at $7/month. I used it for many years through WMC and it was highly accurate and reliable
My longtime WMV boxed died late last year and I had been researching endlessly where next. When I stumbled across the HDHomeDVR project and get channels on the new apple tv with recordings stored on a NAS i was very excited and backed the HDHomeRun DVR project. I got onboard Channels for Live TV and have been very happy with the quality of LIVE TV and the UI, the quality of the guide data for australia has been poor.
When I heard you were going to do the DVR option on your own i was excited as I have been disappointed in SD’s progress to date and on the flip side you have been delivering incremental updates regularly. However i then read US only and went back to disappointment. Please work hard and quickly on the US release so you can get onto expanding functionality to support Australia.
PS don’t worry about the UK do them after Oz 
We’re closer, Oz can wait lol
Hi yea must say how disappointed I was when I found out this was starting us only I think it’s safe to say you have quite the international audience
Please reconsider your roll out plans
+1 UK 
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Will there be a metadata provider? To my knowledge many countries don’t have anything special in the DVB-stream and only the show name and some other information. This applies atleast to my country.
Basic EPG data is freely available across Europe and Australia via the DVB stream, but as @damstas mentioned, this does not include always include metadata (like season/episode number and original airdate) which is required to build a DVR (for instance, if you only want to record new episodes of a show).
The DVB stream also does not include any images, which makes it tough for us to implement the rich visual experience we are aiming for with Channels. There are a few companies which provide metadata and images, but as UK users are well aware the accuracy can be very hit or miss.
Rest assured, we are spending a lot of time looking into this and want to provide our international customers with the best experience possible.
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Good to hear. There seems to be some providers to choose from: Rovi, Gracenote, FYI Television, etc. Without metadata provider. recording shows would be hard. Here is a vote from Finland hoping that you will use one.
They may have their hands tied. In the US Rovi currently holds the Patents on the “Grid” guide view and one of the issues that SD had was that Rovi would not license the Grid patent without SD also paying for the guide data through Rovi. (and anyone who has used WMC since they switched to Rovi can attest to the issues with the Rovi data)
Just added my vote to work on Australian tv Data. Would be happy to provide a URL to the xmltv file for the channels dvr to use.
Also happy to give my ice tv xmltv file url if you can’t secure your own feed data.
DM me for the Australian ice tv data file.
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any update on DVR support for Australia?
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+1
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Is it possible to use Channels DVR with OTA metadata or will we need to wait for the EPG function to be added?
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Any news on Australian support for DVR? I really love the channels app on apple tv it’s amaze balls but really need the dvr support.
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So it seems that Channels DVR still doesn't support Australian Guide data?
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