MacOS 11, Apple Silicon and Channels

Am I right in assuming that Channels DVR will work or be relatively easy to get working on the new macs that are coming by the end of the year?

Same for MacOS 11 big sur?

Channels DVR Server already runs on ARM. We don’t foresee it as be a big problem.

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That’s good. My hope is a fanless arm Mac mini to be my home server, running channels and other things.

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I am waiting for the same thing. I currently use a 2012 Mac Mini and was thinking about buying a new 2018 Mac Mini but now since they say Apple Silicon Macs are coming by the end of the year, I think I am going to wait.

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Any chance for a MacOS app now? :crossed_fingers::crossed_fingers::crossed_fingers:
Edit: I see y’all have responded elsewhere that it’s under consideration.

Thank you for the hard work. Channels is awesome.

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From what I understand, if you’re using an Apple silicon Mac, you should be able to run the iOS / iPadOS app on the Mac. Unless it is disabled by Channels.

Unless I’m mistaken, every iOS/iPadOS app will not be instantly available through Big Sur or ARM hardware. It’ll be up to the developers to at the very least “port” iPad code to a Mac app and send it through TestFlight for beta and the App Store on the Mac like the iOS and android App Stores.

Edit: I’m mistaken. As I learn below. Thanks, @Robinlmp for sharing.

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Arm macs will run iOS and iPad apps by default. It will be up to developers to opt out. https://www.cnet.com/news/apples-new-arm-based-macs-will-run-iphone-ipad-apps/

Thank you! I appreciate you sharing that with me.

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No worries. There are some fairly legit reasons developers might wish to disable it, but I imagine most will embrace it.

Did the team “benchmark” how well Channels Server performs on the Apple Silicon Dev Kit? Or are you all planning to see how it fares with M1 next week?

I’m debating upgrading to the M1 Mac mini from 2012 quad-core i7 Mac mini. Comskip, ffmpeg and HLS transcoder / encoder are my concerns.

We'll have Apple Silicon Macs in a few weeks. While we expect the computers to be fast, it shouldn't effect Channels DVR Server too much as it's not really performance heavy software, but commercial indexing should be faster.

Channels DVR Server has been running on ARM for years so we expect things to work well. We'll be able to say more in a couple weeks when the hardware arrives.

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How about the Channels App? Will the iOS app now work with MacOS?

Not until we’ve had time to try it.

First report I've seen, apparently it works flawlessly. And now it looks like I'll be buying an M1 MacBook Pro sooner rather than later :slight_smile:

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The DVR doesn't work perfectly. I've had it freeze a couple of time using a M1 Mac mini. Overall it seems okay, but it never froze on me using an intel Mac.

The developers are aware of this and told me there might be problems at first running under rosetta.it's not unusable, just not perfect yet.

In the latest pre-release build we have fixed the freezing issue under Rosetta 2

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Has that build been published? I switched from a Raspberry PI install to a Mac mini M1 install for transcoding. Currently on 2020.09.14.2100.

Pi DVR was fine, but something happened to the hard drive where the DVR lost permissions to the hard drive, checking the drive with Disk Utility killed off all the recordings. Was able to save a backup and migrate to the Mac, but lost all my recordings :(. Gave me the reason to move.

We are testing a new ARM64 native build of the dvr server for M1. To try it out, download the latest installer from https://channels-dvr.s3.amazonaws.com/InstallChannelsDVR.zip

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Downloaded and installed. Working great, the only difference I can tell between it and the Pi is seek times seem slower.