The hardware transcoder on the SHIELD used by Channels and Plex can only do H.264. I don’t think it’s possible to encode H.265 on the device.
It is possible on paper, and can be done via gstreamer on the hacked linux4tegra, or the official development board. To my knowledge no-one’s done it under android on the shield, and given the closed nature of the drivers it might be impossible.
But as I understand, playback is good, as it h.265->h.264 transcoding.
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Very interesting. Can you grab another one, preferably from a recording on a different channel?
Interested in another failure log as well
As requested… One note these were both scheduled through the web interface, going to the Guide, and then choosing two random (well, not random… one broadcast channel [comskip3.log] and one AVC channel [comskip4.log]) shows that were going to start soon.
https://stephens.cc/logs/comskip3.log
https://stephens.cc/logs/comskip4.log
2017/05/19 18:00:00 [DVR] Starting job 1495216800-ch828 It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia on ch=[828] 2017/05/19 18:00:00 [DVR] Waiting 5h59m59.41570888s until next job 1495238400-79 The Originals 2017/05/19 18:00:00 [DVR] Recording for job 1495216800-ch804 from 131F24D4 ch804 into "TV/Justice With Judge Mablean/2017-05-19-1800 Justice With Judge Mablean 2016-10-28 Hes Too Heavy Hes My Brother Table Top Drunk.mpg" for 30m59.964164973s 2017/05/19 18:00:01 [TNR] Opened connection to 131F24D4 for ch828 2017/05/19 18:00:01 [DVR] Recording for job 1495216800-ch828 from 131F24D4 ch828 into "TV/It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia/2017-05-19-1800 It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia 2011-10-20 S07E06 The Storm of the Century.mpg" for 30m59.415665702s 2017/05/19 18:31:00 [TNR] Closed connection to 131F24D4 for ch828 2017/05/19 18:31:00 [TNR] Closed connection to 131F24D4 for ch804 2017/05/19 18:31:00 [DVR] Finished job 1495216800-ch828 It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia 2017/05/19 18:31:00 [DVR] Processing file-914: TV/It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia/2017-05-19-1800 It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia 2011-10-20 S07E06 The Storm of the Century.mpg 2017/05/19 18:31:00 [DVR] Deleting expired job 1495216800-ch804 Justice With Judge Mablean 2017/05/19 18:31:00 [DVR] Finished job 1495216800-ch804 Justice With Judge Mablean 2017/05/19 18:31:00 [DVR] Waiting 5h28m59.397733079s until next job 1495238400-79 The Originals 2017/05/19 18:31:00 [DVR] Waiting 5h28m59.382450527s until next job 1495238400-79 The Originals 2017/05/19 18:31:03 [DVR] Running commercial detection on file 914 (TV/It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia/2017-05-19-1800 It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia 2011-10-20 S07E06 The Storm of the Century.mpg) 2017/05/19 18:31:33 [DVR] Commercial detection failed with exit status 7 2017/05/19 18:31:33 [DVR] Processing file-913: TV/Justice With Judge Mablean/2017-05-19-1800 Justice With Judge Mablean 2016-10-28 Hes Too Heavy Hes My Brother Table Top Drunk.mpg 2017/05/19 18:31:34 [DVR] Running commercial detection on file 913 (TV/Justice With Judge Mablean/2017-05-19-1800 Justice With Judge Mablean 2016-10-28 Hes Too Heavy Hes My Brother Table Top Drunk.mpg) 2017/05/19 18:31:48 [DVR] Commercial detection failed with exit status 7
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I set this up on a Shield, seems to be working okay except I cannot get the remote access to work. I have tried this with the Shield’s network set to DHCP & manual, get the same error either way. My router has port 8089 setup to forward to the Shield’s address, not sure what I’m missing here but I am not that familiar with the Shield so don’t know if there is some setting on that device that I have screwed up.
Remote access worked fine with the DVR backend running on my Mac.
2017/05/20 15:57:15 [NAT] Failed to discover gateway: no gateway found
2017/05/20 15:57:15 soapRequest returned error: Post http://192.168.1.1:34076/ctl/IPConn: dial tcp 192.168.1.1:34076: getsockopt: connection refused
2017/05/20 15:57:15 [NAT] Failed to map port using upnp: Post http://192.168.1.1:34076/ctl/IPConn: dial tcp 192.168.1.1:34076: getsockopt: connection refused
You should just uncheck “Enable remote Access” if you have statically forwarded it in the firewall.
Two of my three recordings last night had comskip complete successfully, so at least it’s almost working.
I updated my router’s firmware and rebooted now remote access is working, all is right in the channels DVR universe again…
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Any way to move the Channels storage to the external drive or an internally formatted drive (I have a 265GB SSD attached)? It’s using 2GB and Plex is using 8GB and I’m getting the “Low on storage” messages.
After a one day settle in period, the only anomaly I still see is time code is off by 4 hours (UTC vs EDT?).
2017/05/21 22:17:33 [DVR] Recording engine stopped.
2017/05/21 22:17:48 [DVR] Recording engine started in /storage/DCA07F46A07F2664/Nvidia_Shield/dvr
2017/05/21 22:17:48 [SYS] Created database snapshot: backup-20170521.221748
2017/05/21 22:17:53 [NAT] Failed to discover gateway: no gateway found
2017/05/21 22:17:53 [NAT] Failed to discover upnp: Cannot find the local IP address
2017/05/21
All done at 18:00-18:30 edt
Very impressed with transcode abilities on Nvidia Shield. I’ll be doing some additional tests with running Plex for playback and simultaneous Channels recordings/playback from Shield.
Having a QNAP 251A (low powered NAS) may not be necessary, as long as the Shield doesn’t drop network shares…have had some problems with Shield network drops. It was somewhat flaky in the past…just upgraded to Nougat, so hopefully this behaviour will not continue.
It’ll continue. Anytime the Shield is actually powered off, it’ll lose the share and you’ll need to reconnect it. If you just put it “sleep” it won’t lose it (usually). It’s something they’re supposedly working on for the next update, so here’s hoping it’ll remember it.
I’ve testing playback while recording 3 streams and it’s worked great. I haven’t tried transcoding while it’ll also recording, but so far nothing I’ve done has given it an issue at all. I’m probably going to buy a Pro now since this is making such a great server, but I ran out of space on the little 16GB space in the regular.
Prior to upgrade…I lost network mounted shares without turning off Shield. Too early to tell if this has been resolved.
As Channels only allows path to one (locally connected?) drive I don’t understand why you want to replace with the pro? What am I missing?
My Qnap isn’t powerful enough to run as a Plex server, and whereas the Shield runs Plex without a problem, I’ll continue to use the Shield for Plex. Hopefully, I can also simultaneously use the Shield for Channels (transcoding is so much better) so the Qnap will just become an efficient device for backups.
Yeah that’s what I was trying to say… it’s not fully resolved, but it’s better than prior to Nougat.
Because right now Channels is using a little over 2GB of internal storage for the app and the guide data, and my Plex Server is using a little over 7GB. Of the 16GB on the Shield you only get 11GB that’s usable for apps, so I’m basically out of space due to just Channels and Plex. My external where Channels puts the recordings is fine, it’s just the other data you can’t move off the main storage that is causing me some issues (and annoying popups).
Very impressed with transcode abilities on Nvidia Shield. I’ll be doing some additional tests with running Plex for playback and simultaneous Channels recordings/playback from Shield.
Me too. I’ve run Plex on the Shield for some time, and it’s always been great; With a decent wired connection I can record 4 shows and watch 2 either live or recorded on different hosts. The upper limit for live hardware video full HD transcoding is, I think, 3. The one downside is that if Plex on the Shield is live transcoding from MPEG-2 to my Apple TV it can sometimes be slow to respond when skipping back and forth; This is even worse if someone else is watching a show. That is a part of why I like to pre-transcode. This wouldn’t be so bad, except there is no easy “skip to next chapter marker” feature to emulate the “skip to next commercial marker” of Channels DVR without an annoying multiple swipe interface. But other than that it’s a great combo.
Note that Plex server on the Shield can be set up to pre-transcode (they call it optimize) based on user-defined specifications (e.g. https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/214079348). I think you’re limited to Main Profile level 3.1, so expect greater disk usage for the same quality as x264, but for those that do not want “archive quality” this is probably acceptable. And software transcoding on the Shield is pretty slow (below real-time) and tricky to automate right now without controlling it from another computer.
Having a QNAP 251A (low powered NAS) may not be necessary, as long as the Shield doesn’t drop network shares…have had some problems with Shield network drops.
My recollection is that the Shield cannot write to network storage, only read from.
It was somewhat flaky in the past…just upgraded to Nougat, so hopefully this behaviour will not continue.
I just limit it to sleep. The power draw is tiny.
The 2GB usage on internal disk is due to the guide database. We might be able to move that but I’m not sure. I also thought that it was possible to add a USB disk/key and format as “internal storage” and then you wouldn’t need to worry about running out of internal space.
Don’t know if this will help your use case, but I do have a 128gb micro sdxc installed. I haven’t yet checked what my storage usage is, as I just setup a day or so ago (as a new install…no copy of recordings/database). Also, I don’t have Plex creating video preview nor chapter thumbnails.
Thanks for the heads up, as I also have the 16gb base model, so I’ll be checking this out very soon! May have to return to Qnap after all 
Yes correct, I have 2 mounted network shares for Plex that are read only. Worried about the “mounted” local disk dropping, as in the past one or both network mounts have dropped (intermittent).
More troubling…on the first day of Shield Channels setup, the newly mounted local disk dropped off the Shield while recording 2 shows simultaneously. Haven’t had a drop since, but it’s only been 2 days.