Hi there,
i am new User of Channels / Channels DVR and first i want to thank the developers for this great product.
We have a headless Linux Engima2 DVB-S Reciever (Vu+ Duo2) with 4 tuners for Astra 19,2° E in our basement , DVR is running in a Arch Linux VM on my dedicated Proxmox Hypervisor. I export all bouquets as a m3u8-playlist to feed DVR with it. Storage is a TrueNAS NFS share mounted the VM.
Channels Frontend is running on our new AppleTV, 2 FireTVs and some iOS devices.
This setup works flawlessly, i am very happy! Before we had the AppleTV we had DreamPlayer, which directly speaks to the API of the Engima Reciever, that worked also well.
But: Channels is SO MUCH better, what we like mosti s:
- Beautiful GUI: so WAF is very high
- the approach to organize after Shows/Movies/content and not only in channels dimension. In Europe/Germany most Tv Frondends only have a Channel based approach, so u only have the "Guide-View". This is for us a total game changer - it make so much fun to search in the DVR Web-Frontend for stuff, check "On now" in Channels Frontend etc.
- Passes !
- EPG data for Germany and Austria from the builtin providers is top notch
- DVR Web-Frontend is top!
- Fast channel switching
- Virtual Channels
- Love the thumbnails of shows when pressing up - in the channel centered approach of other TV Apps u dont have that, only big channel icons
But there is always also room for improvement:
- have little channel logos or names when showing the show/movie thumbnail in Search/On Now/On Later/Press Up
- as i record only german/austrian movies from TV the ability to search for metadata of movies
** cause german TV is full of US movies, for which better sources exist, i could easiily then filter for movies of countries i am interested in, that are not obtainable by other sources - ability to customize channel numbers, it start at 9000 which feels odd
- i am not able to resort my channels in the m3u8, as then the epg mappings will be off (maybe i am doing something wrong)
- ability to put passes, that dont have recordings yet, in a virtual channel (now i have to come back and add it to virtual channel after first record)
- Guide in DVR Webinterface is missing option to show Channel Collection like in Channels Frontend (only Favorites - which we dont use, or all Channels - which are over 1000 in our case as its Astra 19.2 E)
- Guide in DVR Webinterface needs vertical Lines for full hours and/or repeat the horizontal line with the times every 20 channels or so
- same could be helpful in Channels Frontend
- 24h Format! make time format a customizable option. i hate this medieval am/pm stuff - its also not consistent on our devices:
** AppleTV: 24h but WITH am/pm added (really odd, cause its uses german words vormittags/nachmittags, looking really strange)
** FireTV: 12h but WITHOUT am/pm
** DVR Webinterface: 12h with am/pm - ability to set domainname for bonjour (i dont like the dvr.local suffix,a i have a FQDN for the DVR VM)
- make Quality for Webplayer fully customizable, 10Mbit is "cute"
I know a lot of suggestions, dont get me wrong: the product is awesome, so its more "complaining about first world problems"
Its more about giving some ideas, also from an european perspective.
Kind regards, and thank you for this great product