It really is frustrating, as on paper the Nvidia Shield TV should be the ideal TV server. I should add that, in frustration, I tried installing Linux for Tegra on the Shield. It took a while to install, and while this did work it was crippled by weak support for video encoding. Specifically, there is no way to compile ffmpeg , which Channels DVR uses, to use the hardware encoding capability. In short, it’s not terrible, but transcoding takes a long time and live streaming is out, and so you might as well use an ~$100 ARM board from another supplier.
The only code that could theoretically do the job, gstreamer, which can work with the closed source binaries provided by Nvidia, was extremely difficult to set up and ended up becoming a huge time sync. Allegedly it’s easier with an official Jetson development kit (mostly the same hardware as the Shield TV), but even then you’d have to implement some sort of translation from ffmpeg tog streamer commands, or ask the Channels DVR team to support gstreamer as an alternative.
So personally I switched back to my RK3399 development board running ubuntu, accepted the limitation of overnight software transcoding and dropping it into Plex, and I’m hoping that ffmpeg will eventually support hardware encoding due to the open source nature of the drivers. RK3399 boards are rapidly coming down in price, and so once that occurs I suspect they’ll be the Channels DVR platform of choice for budget tinkerers.
. My only complaint with Kodi and MrMC is both require separate setups on every client…no universal data set.