Mi Box S - DVR Server

Channels DVR Server
#1

After learning that my nice WD NAS will not be able to support TVE I decided to try something that I didn't think would work. I installed the DVR Server app on my Mi Box S. To my surprise not only did it work, but TVE also worked. On top of that I was able to record 6 things (4 Connect Quatro, 2 TVE) while watching a recording from the Mi Box on my phone with the Mi Box connected to my network using WiFi only.

I never imagined this would work. Currently I just have a small HDD connected to the Mi Box and I ordered a USB-Ethernet adapter to make sure the wireless network does not be come a bottleneck. I'll be testing this for a while to see if it fails before putting it into full service.

Has anyone else tested this out? Have you discovered any pitfalls with using a Mi Box as the DVR server?

#2

See discussion on [EXPERIMENTAL] DVR server on SHIELD Tube, etc

#3

You may find the USB ethernet connection to be slower than your WiFi. Many Android TV devices only offer USB2 speeds. I found I was able to get nearly twice the bandwidth using wireless on my TS4K than when using a gigabit ethernet USB adapter because of this difference.

#4

I do know that must USB to ethernet adapters are trash on android. Based on what I've found I know Realtek NICs are terrible as are most. I've seen where a lot of people have great sucess with UGreen adapters. I guess I will find out in a few days.

#5

I had good luck with a Plugable gigabit adapter. The problem isn't really the adpater itself, but rather your device's USB chipset. USB2 maxes out at 480Mbps, and if the USB bus is shared or otherwise limited, the bandwidth may be half that or less. When using a gigabit adapter on the TiVo Stream 4K, the ethernet maxed out at 230Mbps.

Hopefully you'll have better luck.

#6

I would be pretty happy with 230Mbps as that would be around 100GB/hour transfer rate which is about 12 very high quality OTA streams. The big issue I see with wireless is latency and inconsistent throughput. For a download or something with a large buffer no problem, but for something like a local live stream that you don't want to have a large buffer on consistency is better that higher total throughput. I believe the limit on the wireless for a Mi Box is around 150-200 Mbps anyways so it would be an improvement either way. I see latency issues now when trying to seek while watching a recording. Stream looks great and no recording issues, but skipping is a little slow.

Problem I could run into is that the USB port will be shared with the HDD since there is only one of the device. I will report back with the results hopefully latency issues gone and nothing else pops up.

1 Like
#7

thanks Aman!