I have an issue I can't figure out how to resolve. I have a TS4K (de-Tivo'ed) with a Sandisk 64 GB USB-C flash drive. The flash drive is formatted as internal storage. When I have the Channels DVR app loaded on the flash drive, when watching OTA channels I get lots of popups telling me there is a network error for my OTA source and the picture often freezes. When I move the Channels app to my TS4K's internal storage, everything works perfectly. The flash drive is the fastest one I could find and it should be able to easily handle the read/write requests. I only experience this issue on OTA channels and my streaming media plays just fine. My OTA signal strength is in the 70's and 80's and my HDHomeRun is an old CONNECT model (HDHR4-2US). I was curious if anyone else is having a similar problem with running the app on a flash drive. I bought the flash drive so I could have a large buffer but using the internal storage I only get about 9 minutes of buffer.
Sounds like a bandwidth issue. OTA content uses far more bandwidth than streaming, and it sounds like you might be running into issues with this limitation.
I thought about that, but if it were a network bandwidth issue then the issue would be the same whether I was using the internal storage or the flash drive. I also did a speedcheck in the app and it shows a latency of 3.28 ms and a download speed of 213 Mbps between my TS4K and my server.
I switched back to my FireTV 4k stick and the OTA channels are now playing perfectly, as well as all of the streaming channels. I'm using ver 3.5.0 on both the FireTV 4k and the TS4K.
Is your FireTV 4k using the same Sandisk 64 GB USB-C flash drive? I bet thats where the bandwidth issue is.
In fact, I am sure that your issue is that your cheap flash drive cannot write at the bitrate of an incoming OTA channel.
I had moved the app back to internal storage and was no longer using the USB drive.
Channels app also did NOT perform well on my TS4Ks when I moved the app to a USB drive.
I found that only USB3 flash drives gave acceptable performance with the TS4K, even though the port is only USB2.
I was using a Sandisk SDDDC2 64 GB USB-C drive, which is USB 3.1. It should have been more than fast enough. I don't think there's anything faster that I could use. I'm also not aware of being able to reduce the bitrate on my HDHomeRun. If you know of a way to do this without impacting screen image then please let me know.
if you plug it into your computer and copy a large file (a couple GB) to it, how fast does it write?
also test it with a bunch of small files.
I may have solved the issue. Rather than using the USB-C port, I bought a powered OTG adapter and connected the flash drive using the adapter. So far I haven't seen any of the issues that I experienced with the USB-C port. I'll provide an update if things change, but for now I'm happy with the performance.