I'd like to use my Channels DVR at my camp and connect back to the server located at my permanent home. I'm wondering if I need say two streams at my camp, what is the recommended minimum upload speed to achieve this? I have 5mbps upload now which I feel will be a bottleneck for remote connections.
Thanks
Server Quality, in the DVR UI, should give a reasonable starting point:
The answer: depends how many and what you class as tolerable to watch 
I see this under the "Web Player" heading. Does this also control the bandwidth to remote clients, say a Fire Stick located in Maine? Right now the remote stream buffers frequently even if I set the resolution to 240p (360kbps).
No, those are set in the client apps. Settings > Playback > Streaming Quality > Internet Streaming.
Got it. Thanks.
I'm testing this on my cell phone and even at the lowest quality, it still buffers heavily. Could the NAS be the limiting factor? Might it not be able to transcode and pass the video on to remote clients?
That is quite possibly a bottleneck.
Not immediately sure if the Speed Tester built into the app works remotely (?), but that would at least allow you to rule out network connectivity. It's in the Settings somewhere, I don't have control of the remote at the moment
If that provides reasonable results, then it is entirely plausable that the NAS CPU is just not up to it - if you have remote access to that, it should be reasonably easy to test/stream and check the CPU load at the time.
I just checked the speed to my NAS Server. It's the full 5mbps that I get for upload speed. So it must be the NAS which is a low end Synology dual bay NAS used primarily for photo back up. Would my 2017 or 2019 Nvidia Shield be a much better option?
I just tried watching a show on my phone again while the NAS was actually trying to detect commercials on a previous recording and the NAS CPU was pinned at 99% loaded. The RAM was somewhere in the 75% range. Clearly the NAS is the issue here.
Would a Nvidia Shield be any better?
You need a NAS with Intel CPU and QuickSync for real time transcoding. The ARM CPU in your Synology is not capable of transcoding without buffering.
Got it. What about the Nvidia Shield? Would this be a similar issue as the NAS?
Is there a recommended Synology NAS that is a baseline for remote viewing, say the DS 220+?
Thank you!
The DS220+ and SHIELD will both work.
I'll make a switch the Nvidia Shield then. It's amazing what that little box can do.
I'm thinking about using your RPi4 build as a server. I noticed it said that it hardware transcode for 1 stream. So even though it's an inexpensive and low RAM, it shouldn't have this issue and be able to run comskip and stream at the same time? At most, I might be recording two or three channels and watching 1 stream typically inside the local network but sometimes outside. Also, if someday I want to stream multiple streams outside the network is there a way to upgrade or piggyback multiple RPi?
I don’t own one so I can’t say for sure, but I think it may struggle to transcode and comskip at the same time. And you can’t piggyback them together, so the limitations will remain.