Question about how signal is routed for LIVE TV

Channels DVR Server
#1

My setup is as follows. I have my two HDHomeRun Primes in one part of the house near my router and switch.... the PC that serves as the Channels DVR server is located in another part of the house. My main TV is in another room in the house and uses an Nvidia Shield.

My question is, when watching LIVE TV that I'm not recording, does the content go straight from the HDHomeRun Prime to the Nvidia Shield? Or does it still get routed to the PC with Channels DVR server before being routed to the TV with the Nvidia Shield?

The reason I'm asking is I'm still seeing occasional buffering / pixelation when watching Live TV and I"m trying to determine how far the signal is traveling. I never see the issue when watching recordings, only LIVE TV.

Since the PC with the Channels DVR server is located in a far part of the house requiring a significant run of ethernet cable, I"m wondering if that's the cause of the problem. If the traffic is being routed through the Channels DVR server even when not being recorded, that would be a long round trip for the LIVE TV signal.

If so, I'd consider moving the DVR server to another machine or moving the machine itself.

#2

If tuner sharing is on then it goes through the dvr server

#3

I thought I might have been onto something, but tuner sharing was set to off on the Nvidia Shield when I checked.

Again, I never see any corruption in recordings, but when watching live TV I can get pausing/buffering and sometimes the picture gets pixelated. NFL football seems to be especially problematic (higher bitrate?), but I'm seeing it with other programming sometimes also.

When it happens, it seems to happen more than once. Often, it doesn't happen at all. Very difficult to pin down what is going in. If LIVE TV is being routed straight from the Prime to the Shield, that's literalliy the room next door and a very short run of ethernet cable.

Sometimes rebooting the Shield seems to alleviate the issue, so perhaps there's an Android client issue?

I did remove the USB thumbdrive I was using as a buffer recently to eliminate that as a culprit (i.e.slower memory) but that didn't resolve the issue either.