Mac Mini

Playground Hardware
#62

Recording to a network mount is highly discouraged.

If the recorded files are showing corruption, it means either 1) your antenna signal is weak (unlikely with a PRIME), or 2) your exhausting bandwidth limits in your home.

Probably switching to a 1gbps switch would help. I suspect the issues might occur when all tuners are recording. Since a single stream is 18mbps, 3x = 54mbps. And then since you’re recording to a network drive, the data has to travel to the DVR and then again to the drive, so it becomes 2x again, meaning 108mbps. At this point you’re over the 100mbps capacity of your switch.

Similar issues could also occur with only 2 recordings in progress, if you were also trying to watch a recording at the same time. Since you’re so close to the limits any sort of activity on your network can cause resource exhaustion.

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Help moving DVR from macbook pro to mac mini
#63

I mis-typed, the NetGear is a gigabyte switch. I usually only record one show at a time, while watch on another tuner. I also get tuner not available messages even when not recording.
Maybe a better solution would be to put a 2TB drive in the Mac mini. The only reason I pointed to the NAS was that several other people in the community were using this method (Mac Mini > myCloud NAS) with no problems. BTW, not using an antenna. CableCard from TWC Charter.

#64

That’s unexpected. Might be worth double checking all the network connections, and maybe swapping out the cable on the PRIME. Make sure the PRIME is plugged into the switch along with everything else, and not into the Airport.

#65

Ahh, that might be the problem. The Prime is plugged into the Airport. The Mac mini, MYCloud and ATV 4 are all routed to the Netgear switch. I will fix and report. Thanks helping me sort this.

#66

I have Mac mini mid 2011 and have 16gb installed.

#67

How well does the entry level Mini transcode and do the commercial skip?

#68

The entry Mac Mini uses an i5-4260U, and would work pretty well. An issue you’d have though is occasional minor blocking from the hardware accelerating transcoding (I have an Intel NUC that has an i5-4250U). You might want to look for something with a newer CPU if the blocking would be a concern.

#69

I have a 120$ mini PC from Amazon with a 4 cores / Intel® Celeron® CPU N3450 @ 1.10GHz and it does Hardware transcoding and Comskip without any issues.

I’m very pleased with my purchase. I initially wanted a Mac Mini but I didn’t want to shell out 500$ for a single purpose computer. I felt it was overkill. My mini PC runs headless next to my HDHR and I just forget about it.

I could find the link for you if you’re interested.

2 Likes
#70

I’m interested to know what you got. Curious to see what the cheapest PC option is for this for a set it and forget it setup

#71

Beelink AP34 4GB/64GB Windows 10 Home Mini PC Desktop 4K, M.2 SSD Support, Intel Celeron N3450 (up to 2.2 GHz) HD Graphics 500, 1000Mbps LAN/ 2.4G+5.8G WiFi/ BT 4.0 [Support Ubuntu 16.04 Linux OS] https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B06XD2V3Q2/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_LrH8zb9HA7WY5

This is the one I got from Amazon Canada. It’s a bit more expensive than I remebered. Pretty cheap still

I bet you can find the same on amazon.com for less

1 Like
#72

The Beelink M1 is also very similar in specs.

The only downside of the Beelink computers is that they don’t offer a “auto-on after power loss” feature. So if you ever lose power, the DVR wont’ boot back up after power returns.

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#73

Further note:

Beelink AP34 has usb 3.0, whereas M1 has usb 2.0.

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Single bay Synology NAS w/ 4K support
#74

I purchased the latest entry-level Intel NUC mini pc this last month specifically for setting up channels DVR:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MSZTD8N/

I had to add some DDR3 RAM, and I also bought a 2TB regular hard drive. I'm booting with the latest version of Open Media Vault on a Samsung USB 3 thumb-drive so I can also use and easily administer the system as a file server. I had problems installing from an external CD-ROM drive, but got it to go by installing the ISO image on one USB thumb drive, booting from that, and installing to the Samsung USB 3 drive. Installing channels DVR and getting that to work was a cinch, since it is Debian Linux. There are other problems I've had with Open Media Vault however. Seems like some of the services I enabled in the web UI said they were running, but they really were not (like FTP for instance). Also I haven't got SMB to work yet, but AFP works fine.

I wanted to use FreeNAS which is based on BSD, but I discovered that BSD does not have the driver to support hardware transcoding, and the CPU cannot keep up viewing recorded or live TV from the web interface. Anyhow, OpenMediaVault is much less demanding on system resources than FreeNAS (which requires 8GB RAM minimum), and it uses less than 25% CPU while transcoding video (quad-core processor).

I have an IP camera set up outdoors, and I FTP photos/video from that to the mini-pc, and I run a cron job to send the latest photos to weather-underground every two minutes acting as a web-cam for my personal weather station. It does this job splendidly. Running this cron-job on my old D-LINK DIR-320N NAS box was bogging that whole system down (funplug) and the fan was running on high constantly!

This is probably the least expensive way to go right now, for a dedicated channels DVR system that can transcode, and have CPU and resources leftover for doing other interesting things.

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#75

Cheaper yes, but it’s not for everyone! I don’t have the skills you have when it comes to Linux. And i’m Sure i’m not the only one. Mine might be a bit more expensive but it comes with windows 10 and it’s basically plug and play in a matters of minutes.

What it the cheapest plug and play NUC with Win10 preloaded? These looks like powerful little computers. Might recommend one to a friend.

#76

Well I found the same unit with Win 10 preloaded. Price isn’t bad either. 2GB RAM and 32GB eMMC. If all you use this for is a DVR I’m guessing this should work. Get a USB 3.0 external drive. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=1HD-001C-00023&cm_re=NUC6CAYS--1HD-001C-00023--Product
$225.00!

#77

This little PC is probably the best value around.

https://www.amazon.com/Windows-Celeron-Expansion-Ethernet-Computer/dp/B073WWKDT2