Just wanted to share that I was able to load the Channels Whole Home DVR app on the new MacBook air with the new M1 chip and it works flawlessly. I have attached a few screen shots.
Also sorry admin, not sure which category to list this in.
OK OK, this is the news that pushed me over the edge! Looks like I'll be getting an M1 MacBook Pro soon. Amazing!
Presume no full screen?
Does it have keyboard navigation ?
My guess and hope is that clicking the green dot in the top left of the window will make it go full screen, like any other Mac app. Fingers crossed!
This is extremely unofficial and our apps are not available from the App Store for Apple Silicon computers.
He sideloaded the app. I just want to make sure no one makes large financial decisions on this.
We will probably make them available, but not before we try it out and make our own decision on if they should be running on macOS like this.
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Full screen works.
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Be great if you did, a bunch of us have been asking for Channels on macOS, this could be the way to finally do it, for Apple Silicon machines at least, given that Catalyst was a false start and didn't seem to go anywhere much?
UPdate: you can get the Plus / TVE capability by connecting to the DVR from within the Settings area of the app. Very nicE !
I was able to get the app running on M1 mini and I have also updated to the latest 11.1 BigSur patch. I installed Channels app after 11.1, don't know if that would make any difference. Also it treats the M1 machine as an iPad... when it asks me where to watch, it shows iPad or Shield, and iPad is the M1. It is really cool that the feature of Options--Show Stats works on the M1. It is not showing TVE (TV everywhere) channels for me, but this could just be b/c this the normal Channels app, not the "Channels DVR" app that is associated with Plus sub. And Plus sub is required for TVE access. I am just using the Built-in App Store and not trying to side-load the Channels Plus, but that might work, not certain.
You can go to the Settings tab and connect to your DVR from there.
Thank you, just stumbled onto that! Very nice. this might be the best thing I have done on the m1 mini yet!
Multi-View for multiple simultaneous streams to the same M1 client ? This topic may be too strange. I know there are some oddities with trying to run multiple identical macOS apps at same time. I am trying to think of easiest way for multi-view might be just running Channels app 2x ?
Eventually worst case I guess you could run a complete VM of MacOS in a window to achieve this? Not sure the state of VMs, I know Parallels/VMware are working on it. Wondering if anything like this is being considered for channels to allow multi-view type capability. watching 2 channels simultaneously from the same client. seems like Apple silicon would definitely have the power to do this, but not sure if there are challenges of streaming at same time to single client.
Update; I have read and understanding PiP mentioned in the following web address. [https://getchannels.com/docs/apps/usage/picture-in-picture/ ] but I am not thinking about PiP, something more like Multiview that recently launched for fubo.TV on ATV, and ESPN did a while ago
https://www.fubo.tv/news/fubotv-subscribers-with-apple-tv-just-got-a-big-upgrade/
My biggest use of multi-view is sports, but also have started using it more recently for news. I use multi-view on my Dish Hopper DVR, the ESPN app, and tried fubo's implementation recently as well. I understand this might never be main goal for an app like Channels, but it would be incredible.
Edit / Add # 3 : sorry but keep thinking of ways to achieve this. based on another tip, you can just open the admin page for the DVR and use web browser to watch multiple things at the same time. but from what I have read seems like this would put all the load on the DVR server for transcode and not use the power of the client ? Anyway even if this was the only way to ever do this, just a single multi-view web page that was a little easier to control/ choose channels / select volume would be nice.
It depends on the content, but yes that’s accurate, generally.
Would be nice to be able to have picture-in-picture or the guide with picture in a Mac app.
See:
This is not a Mac app. It's an iPad emulator running our iPad app.
The TV Streams app for macOS has a "multiple window mode" that works quite well, streaming live TV from Channels DVR. I added my favorite channels by their .m3u8 address and can then have a few streaming in a grid at the same time.
Example .m3u8 for CNN: http://192.168.1.21:8089/devices/ANY/channels/6030/hls/master.m3u8
Replace first bolded part with the IP address and port of your Channels DVR server, and the second part with the channel number you're wishing to stream.
Have you tested to see how many transcoded streams you can push through it? I'm really interested in this if it's good for 6-7 or more transcodes at a time.
I've had it working with 6 streams, no problem. But I think success in the regard would depend on the hardware capabilities of the Channels DVR, not the client Mac running the TV Streams app. Also, all of my sources are TVE so don't require transcoding.
On AppleTV I use QuadStream, that works great with .m3u8 streams from Channels DVR, as well.
Thanks for the info about TV Streams and QuadStreams. I will check them out. was getting different behavior today with Safari windows with the stream than I was just a week or so ago. I had started looking into the video address stuff.
I have been using TV Streams a decent amount and even had a convo with the developer about some suggestions like handling volume based on mouse over particular windows in a multi-view setup. Overall it is pretty good fit for what I wanted to do, the volume management and channel groupings (I think work-in-progress from dev) would get it much closer to a multi view system using Channels DVR as the back-end. A lot of the times I have tested, multiple of my windows are TVE, so I am not usually putting undue stress for transcoding. I should test that as well though at some point to see if too many mpeg2 transcodes from local channels could choke it up. One of the times I had 4-6 windows running simultaneously on my screen and I was watching CPU via Activity Monitor, I noticed comskip crank up, being Intel architecture, and using up 90+% based on activity monitor report. This is on m1 Mac mini. I didn’t notice it slowing down the machine, but might disable commercial detection. Edit / Update: I have the web server player quality at the default which is 1080p/10mbps and the buffer set to 30secs.