Viewing on Channels at home means no transcoding. I believe when your viewing on TVIMate, you are viewing transcoded signals. Did you try increasing the playback quality under advance tab to see if that closed the gap between Channels and TVIMate picture quality?
EDIT Maybe it doesn't transcore? I tested using xTeve to push into Plex and not seeing a chance in PQ when adjusting the transcoding settings on the CDVR server.
I'm not even sure at this point. TiviMate had some appealing features, but ultimately the UI was too janky for my liking, and I haven't picked it up in a couple months. If I get brave, I'll dig back in and check out the playback quality in the advanced tab.
I recently discovered another entrant in the multiview-capable app space, at least on AppleTV:
I've been playing around with it for a bit on tvOS and iPad and it's pretty nice. It accepted the M3U and EPG I copied out from Channels. Overall it feels a bit better than Tivimate. The app's UI needs some work but it's off to a solid start and the updates have been frequent. Hopefully it keeps getting better.
Here's the format I used that works with the UHF app. I copied the URLs from Channels DVR and edited the first section to be the internal IP address of my CDVR server, made it http:// instead of https://, and removed the "?format=ts&codec=copy" bit at the end:
The "duration" part in the EPG URL isn't necessary, it works without it too: http://CHANNELS-DVR-IP-ADDRESS:8089/devices/M3U-SOURCE-NAME/guide/xmltv
1209600 seconds works out to be two weeks of guide data. So if you're just using UHF for live multiview, and only need 6 or so hours of guide data, it may make sense to use something like 21600 instead.
The search for the Holy Grail continues but in the meantime I've discovered another contender for "Best Multiview Client of 2025" and its name is "Snappier IPTV."
Took me just a couple of minutes to get the hang of it, but I'm already liking it more than UHF for this purpose. Note that the free version is basically a demo, the stream stops after 4 minutes. But payment also unlocks multiview, which this app calls “Multi Screen.”
The cost is $50 for lifetime, $20 annual, $10 for 6 months, or $2 for one month. I sprung for a month and I've played around with it for a few hours now. The interface is bare-bones, but it works well. It covers the bases, offers some new ideas and energy and the overall UI feels reliable and snappy™.
It's pretty easy to configure too, all things considered. I'm impressed and going to stick with it for a few months. The app works pretty well right out of the gate on AppleTV 4K, and not-too-badly on macOS too, for Macs running Apple Silicon.
If anyone else checks it out too, I'm curious to hear what you think.
Hmm, I only fed it a curated Channel Collection of about 25 channels, since all I use this app for is MultiScreen, anyway. Performance and overall UI is very snappy for me, certainly compared to the previous 5 multiview apps I’ve tried over the years. At least on a 4K AppleTV...
I've Dockerized Multichannel View for those with amd64 processors. Tested and working nicely with Intel Quicksync. I'll add it to Project One-Click soon: