Moved DVR server from NAS to Mac Mini... mostly works, mostly

Channels DVR Server
#1

The transition was painless, I installed the server on the mini, shut down the instance on my old NAS, and pointed at the same directory (on the NAS) that I was using before. So all the recordings and config transferred flawlessly.

But now transcoding doesn’t appear to work at all (my NAS would at least try, play a few frames, buffer, play some more frames).

Apple TV and iOS clients work fine, playing live TV or previously recorded shows. No issues there.

But anything that requires transcoding simply just spins and spins, not showing an error, it just never starts playing. The affected clients are below:
-Web player within the server management page
-iPhone client over LTE (which doesn’t allow “original” stream)–note that this says “no tuners found” though it works fine over WiFi, even from a different wifi network
-Amazon FireTV stick

This is a 2011 Mac Mini (quad-core Sandy Bridge) which should handle transcoding fine, and I’ve tried setting it to both “hardware” and “software” but it’s the same behavior. All the other settings look fine. What am I missing?

#2

Here are the logs when starting a live TV session in the web player:

2017/12/07 17:45:23 [TNR] Opened connection to 1053E30D for ch2.1 [transcode=heavy]
2017/12/07 17:45:23 [ERR] Failed to create probedata.mpg: open /Volumes/Videos/DVR/Streaming/ANY-ch2.1/probedata.mpg: no such file or directory
2017/12/07 17:45:23 [HLS] Starting transcoder for channel 2.1 (encoder=h264_videotoolbox, resolution=, deinterlacer=blend, bitrate=10000)
Could not write header for output file #0 (incorrect codec parameters ?): No such file or directory
Error initializing output stream 0:0 –
[aac @ 0x7f9dd3829600] 2 frames left in the queue on closing
2017/12/07 17:45:39 [WRN] Buffer for 1053E30D ch2.1 is more than 50% full (clients=1, len=16777684)
2017/12/07 17:45:48 [WRN] Buffer for 1053E30D ch2.1 is more than 75% full (clients=1, len=25165868)
2017/12/07 17:45:58 [WRN] Buffer for 1053E30D ch2.1 is more than 95% full (clients=1, len=31877468)
2017/12/07 17:46:00 [WRN] Buffer for 1053E30D ch2.1 is more than 99% full (clients=1, len=33219788)
2017/12/07 17:46:08 [HLS] Stopping transcoder session ANY-ch2.1 @ 0s
2017/12/07 17:46:08 [TNR] Closed connection to 1053E30D for ch2.1

Looks like it fills the buffer on the HDHR since the stream never starts.

#3

AAAAAND I figured it out. It looks like a permission issue. Let me try a couple of things…

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#4

Fixed.

Post-mortem for anybody else that runs into this issue after moving a DVR server (while using the same network share).

The DVR running on the NAS created directories with permissions for the NAS user; but after moving to the Mac Mini, it couldn’t write in those same directories because now it’s coming in as anonymous.

Changing directory permissions on the NAS to allow read/write access for anonymous (in my DVR directory) fixed the issue. Probably not the BEST idea from a security perspective but I’m too lazy to set up a dedicated user right now…

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