Problems Setting Up Channels DVR

Channels DVR Server Troubleshooting
#1

I use a combination of YouTube TV and Philo for TV. Recently saw an article which said Channels could be used to see the content from both services in a single place, which interested me - so I decided to give a try. So far I'm not having much luck getting things set up.

I got my Channels account set up, and decided to give the Synology NAS option a try. I downloaded it and installed on my Synology NAS with no issues. Tried to add my YouTube TV account. Entered my login info, and all it did was "sit and spin" with a message of "Verifying login on YouTube TV." Never went past that. I found on here where it said it won't work if you have 2FA enabled on your Google account. So I made a new account with no 2FA and added it to my YouTube TV "family" as suggested. Tried to log in with this new account, and still get the same thing. All it does is "sit and spin" with a message of "Verifying login on YouTube TV." OK. So I give up and try Philo.

I select Philo, enter my email address, and click on "Email Login Link." It changes to a message of "Waiting for you to click the Philo TV login link in your email." I receive the email from Philo and click on the link. That opens a Philo web page asking me to confirm I'm logging in to a new Android TV device. I click on "Confirm sign in" and it then tells me I'm successfully signed in. I go back to my Channels DVR and the message has changed to "Verifying login on Philo," and all it does is "sit and spin" there, just like trying to log in to YouTube TV.

So then I thought "I'll give it a try on my Mac instead." I downloaded the Mac installer and started it up. It never finishes installing. I see the following messages in the installer window:

Starting Installer...
Fetching latest version number...
Downloading Channels DVR v2020.02.19.0306 into /Users/scot/Library/Application Support/ChannelsDVR...
darwin-x86_64.sha256
channels-dvr
[ERROR] unexpected EOF

And the installer never gets past that point.

I paid the $80 for a year of service because it looked like this was going to be pretty cool, and I don't mind supporting the devs of stuff like this - but so far this has been a mess and a big disappointment. I'm pretty tech savvy and normally don't have any problems with stuff like this. Am I doing something wrong?? Are other people having these issues?

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#2

Sorry for the troublesome experience

Your NAS has an old ARM processor, so it's not going to work for TVE. It should be erroring out and saying that so there must be a bug causing it to get stuck.

On your Mac it seems the download is failing part way through. Are you running any VPN or firewall or something on the Mac which would interfere with internet access?

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#3

Thanks for the info!

You might want to add info to the Synology download section to alert folks about older ARM processors not being supported. I see for the minimum requirements at the top of the page (which doesn't change based on device selected) it lists "1GHz CPU (64-bit Intel, or 32-bit/64-bit ARM)" - and my Synology NAS does have a 1.07GHz CPU in it.

I don't have a VPN or firewall currently enabled on my Mac, but I do have a Winston Privacy device on my network. Maybe that's interfering? Although it hasn't caused any issues with anything else downloading. https://www.winstonprivacy.com/

#4

So, it was Winston Privacy that was causing an issue with the download for some reason. I bypassed Winston by using a VPN and was able to complete the install on my Mac.

I was able to setup Philo with no problem, but YouTube TV appeared to still be having the same issue - but then it started working. Just took it longer than Philo to continue on and start verifying access to channels.

Thanks for the help!

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