NEW: Remote DVR Access on iOS

It looks like only transcoded streaming from MPEG-2 is available still. Is there any reason not to stream the raw MPEG-2, for those of us with minimal ARM systems? With gigabit fiber becoming common the need to reduce bandwidth has lessened.

You can set Internet Streaming to Original to stream raw mpeg2.

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I am not sure if I should be posting to this thread or starting a new one.

I installed the Beta version of IOS to test the remote DVR access along with watching content remotely last week. I have been updating to the latest version which seem almost daily. I am a new user to channels in the last couple of weeks.

I am currently on 10.16.1823.

Up until yesterday, I could remotely access both my recordings and watch live remotely.

However, my router and internet hung today and I had to restart my router.

I now canā€™t access remotely my tuners via wifi or cell but can if I am on my home network.

I went in to http://192.168.1.19:8089/admin/settings and saw that my automatic port forwarding ā€œfailedā€ and selected automatic again, disabled and enabled port forwarding and I still can not access remotely.

When I select Remote Access Access your DVR away from home via my.channelsdvr.netā€¦ it never completes.

I suspect that I have some port forwarding problem but I donā€™t know what to do next.

@gsulshski It should be working again. Looks like thereā€™s a bug that happens sometimes when your IP address changes. Iā€™m working on a fix.

I tested it and it is now workingā€¦thanks!

@tmm1 Any chance weā€™ll be able to specify a remote IP address manually for the DVR? Iā€™m connecting over my VPN and canā€™t access the DVR from the app. When I manually add a tuner, it fails as well (my VPN is on a different subnet from my main network so Bonjour discovery doesnā€™t work). I know that Iā€™m an edge case, but I donā€™t want to open up any ports to the outside world.

Thanks!

You might be able to setup some sort of mdns repeater to get bonjour working on your VPN.

Remote access assumes youā€™re connecting over the channelsdvr.net domain and ssl certificate. This assumption is baked pretty deep into the code right now, so itā€™s unlikely to change in the near future.

5 posts were split to a new topic: Remote DVR: problems watching recordings (spinner when resuming)

Yeah, you could always just set up a bonjour service somewhere else that advertises with the right service type (_channels_dvr._tcp) and points directly at the ip address, and just fake it.

DVR Access Failure

So I had everything working fine. Then I rebuilt my Google WiFi network which will have updated my dynamic IP. I setup manual port forwarding again I can login to the DVR webui over cellular using my public IP:8089 so the port forward must be working OK. However the Channels app gives DVR Access Failure - The request timed out. The ddns entry allocated to my server no longer resolves to my correct IP address.

OK fixed it. Had to log out and then log back in again on the authorisation webpage in the Channels app. Another post mentions something about this when moving from http to https. Will this affect everyone on a dynamic IP that migrates from beta to release?

I updated your IP manually which is why it started working. Thereā€™s still a bug that occurs sometimes when a userā€™s IP changes that Iā€™m trying to track down.

Thanks. Pretty nasty bug for a DDNS service!!!

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Thanks for the feedback. While not as pretty, the web UI seems to work fine for the rare times that I remotely use it.

Hopefully youā€™ll consider adding a setting in the future for manually configuring it.

When Letā€™s Encrypt launches wildcard certs next year, weā€™ll have a lot more flexibility and it will be easier to let you specify your own IP.

I set this up today and when I tried to view a remote DVR recording it said ā€œNo DVR Transcoder. Sorry your Channels DVR computer is not powerful enough to compress video for remote viewing.ā€ Iā€™m using a Synology NAS. Does to mean I canā€™t use remote DVR viewing?

Yes, your NAS has an ARM processor which is not powerful enough for remote viewing. We recommend a NAS or computer with an Intel Pentium or Celeron (which have Intel Quick Sync support) for best results.

Thanks for the quick reply!

Will the sub domain of channelsdvr.net change for my account? If I setup a static DNS entry for XYZ.channelsdvr.net on my network that points to an internal IP address, could that work? Thanks!

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Yes that would work. The domain will not change for your account.