Need advice on running Channels DVR server on NVIDIA SHIELD TV versus RPi 4

I am currently running PLEX, Surveillance, Backups, Channels DVR on my QNAP TS 251+ NAS (8GB RAM). It has been working with my HDHomerun receivers in conjunction with the TV Everywhere capability. I have linked my DirecTV, YouTube TV and Philo TV accounts and leverage the commercial deletion functionality.

Everything has been running like a champ for about 6 months with no issues however, I am taxing my NAS to the max. It is always at 100% and can’t even navigate the menu on the QNAP NAS.

I thought I could offload the Channels DVR to another device. Here are my options.

I have two NVIDIA SHIELD TVs (2017 and 2019 non-pro model). I would either just purchase a 4TB drive or map them to my QNAP NAS to record/play videos.

Or should I purchase a Raspberry PI 4? I read it has a GPU albeit not nearly as powerful as the NVIDIA devices. I did read but not confirm the NVIDIA TV SHIELD does not log in to your TV Everywhere YouTube TV account.

I read online some people wanted to do the same but did not confirm if they actually did move to the other platform and happy with the performance.

Thank you in advance.

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I can only speak to the Pi 4. I’ve been using it for a few months now and have had no issues whatsoever. I grabbed a Flirc case for it, so there’s no noise. My Pi only has 2GB or RAM, which is just fine for Channels. I’d recommend grabbing one and loading the Channels DVR image.

I think the first thing would be to identify what is using the most CPU. In my experience, it uses the most when either using commercial detection. I know that Pex will transcode a lot of sources, so that could be an issue depending on the source files and client settings.

I used a 4GB Pi 4 in a Flirc case for about 5 months. RAM was never a issue so a 2BG model probably would work fine. For recording and regular playback of a few channels it works well. The commercial detect pegs the CPU and it takes a while to complete. The GPU is only used while transcoding (not remux) which depending on the source, the pi just cannot do in real time. For example, one of my channels is 1080i, which required transcoding to watch via the web UI. The best it could do was transcode at .96x, so there was constant buffering without the adaptive playback.

First rather than offload channels, try running the plex server on one of the shields and seeing how that works.

If you need transcoding and you want Youtube TV, it might be worth it to find a used pc with a QuickSync intel cpu (something like an i3 from within the last few years would be good enough). I've done some testing with a i5-10400 in unraid, transcoding 1080i to 1080p increases the cpu usage ~4% at the worst.

With 3 different providers, plus the HDHR, how many recordings do you usually at one time. Just a guess, but I bet you are doing a lot. Maybe see what the NAS is doing along with whatever else it does.

Thank you for your feedback, you have given me some good ideas. I have a spare HP Desktop but it heats up my office/server closet especially in the summer. So, I limit it to 2 x NAS’s and an old 2014 Mac mini that are always on. The Texas summers can be brutal and even have a portable A/C unit in that room to keep it cool.

I had Channels DVR server running on the Mac mini 2014 but had an issue retaining a mount consistently.

So right now, I have Channels DVR Server running on the 2017 NVIDIA Shield TV and it is networked to my Synology NAS DS212 which I had since 2012. For the last day it has been running very well. Thus far from that, I can tell I have no issues with youtubeTV but we will see. Regarding my QNAP TS 251+ NAS, I do run many programs on it and it is quite taxed. And I sometimes have a few shows being recorded at the same time. Thank you everyone once again.

So I have been running Channels DVR server on my NVIDIA 2017 Shield TV with a networked mount to my Synology NAS for 6 days and it runs well with no issues. I have a direct ethernet connection from the Shield TV to the NAS so that helps with not much delay due to the network. I am impressed with how Channels DVR server runs on the NVIDIA Shield TV

Today I did acquire a 2TB external drive and now debating which server to use.

The reason I switched to NVIDIA Shield TV was the Mac mini would not keep an SMB mount. However, doing some research I solved that issue using AFP and no longer have an issue with it losing the mount. And all of my TV Shows and Movies are stored on a NAS. So the Channels DVR Server can also access them as well.

Now I am debating to either install the 2TB external drive on the NVIDIA Shield TV or just move everything over to my spare Mac mini (late 2014 model) that has a 3GHz i7 processor and 16GB of memory, an internal 2SSD internal drive, and also use the newly purchased 2TB external drive.

My concerns are:

  1. Stability - crashes, how often do I need to reboot, etc.
  2. Performance (commercial deletion). Which would be faster? I heard the GPU on the Mac mini 2014 is so so.
  3. How difficult is it to install the 2TB External drive to the NVIDIA Shield TV and configure the system to use that drive instead of the network drive to access shows.
  4. And which system will be able to handle h265? I read somewhere (maybe incorrectly) channels DVR can't use h265 with NVIDIA . I could be wrong.

Thoughts? Advice?

I’d lean towards the Mac. I think it will be easier and more reliable, in general. There is a limitation with YouTube TV as a TVE provider on the shield, but that’s the only major one I can think of.