Guess they did stop it.... That is one of the reasons I upgrade before EOL. You can still upgrade to windows 10 and Activate at a future date Channels DVR will run on it even if not activated.
Linux is free. None of the hassles of windows and is rock solid
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Thanks.
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Well it was working well all day and even watched a recorded show on my ipad. Tried to watch another show on tv firestick and no longer loading recordings or showing guide information again. Just snagged a great deal from AZN on a beeline mini computer with windows 11 to hopefully end all problems.
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Welcome to the community, Chris.
I'm disappointed that suspending the current release was not considered an option. As a developer myself, I am really curious what changed in the app that caused it to break. Short of implementing new API libraries or frameworks, its been my experience that windows is usually quite tolerant of running apps on older OS versions.
I found this post which provided a helpful hint.. where the update is pulled from.
Well, for now, I put an entry in my host file pointing that URL at my localhost IP, and put the prior version back into latest folder, and it seems to be running fine for now. Whether this breaks other services like guide data updates I have no idea yet.
I've known for a while I need to update to a different server OS. But I have lots on this server including Plex, which I am not looking forward to migrating. Yes I know Plex has announced they no longer support the old OS, but theirs hasn't broke yet. Overall I still prefer Channels over Plex.
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No offense, but you're more than a bit overdue. From Microsoft's own statements regarding WHS11's EOL:
Windows Home Server 2011 mainstream support ended in the second quarter of 2016.
That's nearly 7.5 years ago, more than enough time to update the OS.
(And just to help temper the comment, I have a server in production running OpenBSD 6.2, whose "official" support ended with the release of 6.4, which was released 18 Oct 2018. I have only just finished migrating it to 7.4 stable; so while this is a little "pot, kettle, black", it is also an acknowledgement that you shouldn't honestly expect current server software to run in your outdated and unmaintained OS version.)
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Migrating Servers ETC... of non-supported OS before it breaks is good practice.
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Quick related question on the Mac side.. Ive been running channels dvr on an ancient 2010 mac mini High Sierra for 2-3 years flawlessly, but I cant update the os any further. I just came across this thread and my heart stopped when I went to the channels support page and noticed the dvr is officially supported on Ventura and up. Glad I read this thread, or I would have never known about that.
Has the minimum supported mac os changed over the past several years, or was I just lucky when i did my installation on my High Sierra machine several years ago?
Perhaps as others suggested, during installation channels should at least pop up a compatibility installation warning? And in the General troubleshooting checklist under “macOS Login items” a warning flag for an un supported os?
I am actually so grateful that channels has run flawlessly on a 14 year old machine for so long.
Time to bite the bullet and and get a new server machine. I think Im going to go the apple silicon route.
Yes, as time moves on, support for older operating systems are dropped. Certainly for operating systems that are no longer supported by their vendors.
Does this mean they will immediately stop working? No, we don’t do anything to prevent them from working. But we don’t do anything to keep them working.
Your suggestion is good and it’s exactly what we plan on doing in the future.
You can always see what our supported versions are on our website.
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Linux provides a different set of hassles. To expect somone that can't deal with the upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 to be able to move to Linux is totally unrealistic.
As a developer you should be well aware of the complexities of regression testing. It is quite reasonable to stop supporting and testing on obsolete systems. Furthermore, the security risks of running these old systems should not be encouraged and continuing to support encourages this unsafe behaviour.
Furthermore, it dose not make business sense to invest in supporting those that fail to meet minimum requirements.
We are a team of three that manage two entirely separate app codebases that are distributed through three different app stores, each with two different presentations between TV and hand-held, with many different size classes for all of them across multiple OS versions and minor updates for tens or hundreds of different devices with their own quirks.
On top of that, we have a DVR codebase that runs across six different hardware architectures for five different Operating Systems and eight different NAS platforms. Those Operating Systems all have many versions that the DVR can run under, many of which have their own quirks.
The situation that we're running into today is the fallout of fixing a performance issue in our Tailscale integration on Windows. We worked with the Tailscale team to identify the issue and they were able to mitigate it, which required that we updated to a new version of their library. They made the decision to target Go 1.21 in the latest version, which required us to do the same. The Go team had decided to end support for Windows 7 in Go 1.21 due to Microsoft, Chrome, etc. no longer supporting this generation of Operating System. At the time of us making this change a few weeks ago, we were not aware of this change and the implications it would or wouldn't have.
Generally when we have changes like this in a pre-release for a few weeks, it is long enough to surface any issues across our customer base that would prevent us from shipping this more widely. It's clear that in this case, none of our customers running Windows 7 were active on this site or downloading pre-releases, so no one was aware of this issue.
We're continuing to work to figure out a solution to this immediate issue within the bounds of the options and tools we have available to us.
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And, just to repeat this again. This happened on operating systems that we don’t support and never gave guarantees for Channels DVR Server working on.
We believe we have a workaround to get people on Windows 7 back up-and-running. We have built a new build of the build from November that has a recent build number which will prevent it from trying to update to the Stable release that recently came out.
To use it:
- Download https://cdn.channelsdvr.net/2023.12.30.2006/channels-dvr.exe-windows-x86_64
- Move
C:\ProgramData\ChannelsDVR\latest\channels-dvr.exetoC:\ProgramData\ChannelsDVR\latest\channels-dvr-prev.exe - Copy the downloaded
channels-dvr.exe-windows-x86_64toC:\ProgramData\ChannelsDVR\latest\channels-dvr.exe - Start the DVR
This should have the DVR running reporting version 2023.12.30.2006.
Once that is done, please go to Settings -> Status -> Update Pre-Release and you should be running the latest build again.
As we evaluated this situation, we identified additional safety checks we could implement during upgrade to ensure the new version can successfully run before completing the upgrade. We hope this will prevent future issues of these sorts of upgrades causing DVRs to stop functioning.
As @maddox has said before, over the long term, it is important for the DVR and Client software to regularly update. If we are unable to find ways for newer releases to run on older Operating Systems, running old DVR versions will likely eventually cause issues that we are unable to address.
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Thank you Eric!
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Nice work and thanks! I'll be upgrading machine to Win10 this week, but this fix gets me some time to make it happen.
Heartfelt thanks to you three for continuing to do amazing work and being incredibly approachable and supportive.
Thank you for working on a solution and for the explanation on what happened. Just to clarify, this is a temporary solution and we should assume to continue to get future updates that we are still required to upgrade our older OS?
I would like to suggest that as part of your licensing check call, you send the OS information so that you can be aware of what users are running out there.
I will start working on my server upgrade. Its a multi-day project that I have not been looking forward to. For my purposes, my "antique" server was still perfectly adequate. In my case, being on WHS, MS did not give a good upgrade path for the product.