Moving DVR from Shield to RPi

[Ron_Lawrence]

I searched the forums but didn't find exactly what I was looking for. I have an 8 Gb external drive for my recordings plugged into my Shield. As of right now it has less than 1Gb of recordings on it. Obviously I don't want to lose my recordings. The problem is that I need this drive to put the software for the Pi. Is there an easy way for me to transfer those file so I can load the software? Do I even need to transfer the files?

Even though I've been here a few months I've never used a Pi before. It looks simple enough, I just don't want to screw it up.

Oh, if I've missed it in the forums just point me the way home.

[chDVRuser]

I'm sure someone using it or one of the devs will reply, but from what I've read you can use a small SSD to install the Channels DVR Pi image on and continue to use your 8GB external USB drive for recordings.

I would make a Channels DVR Database backup from your Shield (assuming you have that as your Channels DVR Server) and follow instructions they give you to either restore or migrate your recordings to the Pi.

Channels — Raspberry Pi

You should probably take a look at the thread for that Pi image if that's what you're going to use.

BETA: Channels DVR Server for Raspberry Pi 4 (USB BOOT IMAGE)

We're working on an official RPi4 image for Channels DVR Server! You can flash this image directly on a USB3 drive, then attach that to an RPi4 and it will boot up into a fully functional DVR. This is made possible by RPi4's new USB boot support, which means flaky SD cards are no longer required and you end up with a much faster and more reliable Pi-based DVR. Our RPI4 image is based on an ARM64 embedded linux distribution, and has been optimized to fully take advantage of the Pi4 CPU and GPU …

Normally I would tell someone to follow these docs, but not sure if it applies to moving from a Shield to Pi as server.

How do I move Channels DVR Server to a new computer?

[noviceTV]

I don’t get it. If you already have the DVR running on a Shield why would you move it to a less capable Pi?

[racameron]

@noviceTV

If you already have the DVR running on a Shield why would you move it to a less capable Pi?

Because some latency issues can arise when using a Shield for both server and client? Or because a Shield does not support YouTubeTV TVE accounts? Or because a Pi has lower energy requirements?

[chDVRuser]

Because you can "bring it with you to another platform".
I'm testing it on two different NAS's and on Docker.
Running three sources, HDHR Prime, TVE and Locast.

[Ron_Lawrence]

I'm doing it because I have an Android TV that I've got the Shield hooked up to. The other TV is an LG that doesn't work with the Fubo. So I put the Shield with the LG, put the Channels client on the Android TV and the server on the Pi. I might leave the server on the Shield but I've had some weirdness lately of the server recording duplicates. I'm hoping separating them will give me a clue to see what the problem is.

Thanks for the help everyone.