Questions About Channels DVR

#30

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Do yourself a favor and leave the DVR on 24/7. I would gladly pay the extra $2 a month in electricity to not have my wife complain that nothing worked when she decided to watch TV at a time when the server was off. Servers are made to run
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She is use to turning the server on and the Mac Mini, which is running EyeTV, when she wants to watch a recorded show. I do have it scripted and LaunchDaemons that wait for the server volume to show up before launching EyeTV no matter when she turn them on, even reverse sequence.
Our electric rate when up 50% a couple months ago which was already high.
I have been running the server like this for 12 years with no issues.
It serves no purpose to run 24 hrs a day when it is only used max 6 hrs most days. The more it runs the more heat during the summer, wear and tear and dust it collects. I currently live in a house built in 1891.
Even if it was on, it still shuts the dockers down while doing backups of App Data so in effect would go off line anyway and files get moved at 1:30 am off the cache drive where all new recordings go.

#31

If your NAS is using spinning disks, you are doing far more damage to the disks constantly restarting the system causing the disks to quickly spin up.

You're welcome to run your system as you see fit, but you may want to actually investigate if your "mitigations" are actually helping.

#32

Not here for a debate on how I should use my server but in the interest of information, the average age of my drives is 10 years. In more than 12 years I have had only 1 drive go bad and that was a drive I recycled from another use. So I'm not doing too bad on drives here. I have replaced a couple drives to upgrade to larger capacity but those older drives are still in use in other areas and are tested in depth before reuse. So I would say my "mitigations" are doing just fine. If the server was on, in use for more than 2/3rds of the day I would consider letting it run.

#33

I can understand this. My pet peeve is when my colleagues try to convince the customer that their requirements are not valid. So I definitely understand..

But.... As you get into Channels you may find that with Adavnced passes, you will be recording shows/movies that air at all hours. Take a look at my pass for Classic Christmas Movies.

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You may find that "smart" scheduling of passes creates a handicap with your power schedule. As an alternative, you could put the server on a Pi and hang an SSD off of it and go that way. But then you would have to weigh the equipment costs vs power cost for keeping your current rig powered all the time. Might take you a long time to break even.

#34

If you only plan to record shows during the "on" hours of your NAS/Server then you'll be good.
If your wife knows the Channels app will only work during the "on" hours of your Server then you'll be good.

All recordings happen on the server. Clients only buffer streams.

The Channels Server is designed to run continuously, and has the ability to schedule task, like retrieving guide info and updating libraries during non-peak hours. When your server kicks on at 4pm it will need to run these tasks to update guide info and libraries as well as check for updates and other backend tasks.

Again this is your setup so if all of that is good with you then it should work out. As you can probably tell from this thread 95% of users have their server always running, there could be hiccups we are unaware of because we don't run our servers the way you plan to run yours.

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#35

Thank you.. kthomas1059
We are use to EyeTV taking 7 minutes or so to go through all the recordings to build a list each time it is started plus the 2 or 3 minutes to get the server up. Then we use Titan TV from an iPad to Schedule the evening shows at least an hour ahead of time so EyeTV will have time to download the schedule, since they broke the schedule listing in EyeTV for the version we need to run.
Sometimes I have to download manually if it's to close to the start time.
One minor issue I can see is retraining my wife to wait for the server to be ready before she runs the App on ATV since I can't script it on IOS. I don't think.

#36

@Uno1 You have a lot more patience than I do. When I hit the power button, I want to be watching a show in less than 30 seconds, not waiting 10 minutes. :angel:

#37

How we doing on that metric?

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#38

If I may, I would just suggest you test the Channels DVR software, asking questions as you go. As a pleasant surprise, you may find that it removes a bunch of complexity from your current routine, maybe even enough to sway you to adjust your hardware uptime schedule. Maybe not, but that's up to you.

#39

Channels DVR does exceptionally well in this regard.

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#40

I use buttonmapper to set a key on the remote for ChannelsDVR

~5 sec = power on TV, receiver, ShieldTV and start ChannelsDVR
~25 sec = figure out what I want to watch (I have way too much to pick from :wink:)

#41

Warm start: 1 second.
Cold start: 6 seconds
Playback a recording: 3 seconds.

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#42

Come back here once you start playing around with things. As others have stated it is sometimes easier to walk you through things as they come up, especially since your use case is somewhat unique.

#43

I have Channels installed on an old PC that I put to sleep every night. I've been using it for years, along with an Apple TV as a client, with no problem whatsoever.

When the PC is off the Apple TV will simply say it can't locate the server. Any recording scheduled during the offline time will simply be skipped, so I just double check every so often that I don't have any recording scheduled during the down time or leave the PC on when I do--easy peasy.

#44

At the moment we prefer to schedule recordings each day, sometimes Smart is not so smart. CBS on Sunday is a PIA, shows are always running late due to games so we have to record shows we don't want following what we do want so we don't end up with 1/2 or 2/3rds. The only time we schedule in advance is if we go away for a week or so, then I would keep the server running. I have a PI running automation with OpenHab but I'm thinking of moving that to a Mac Mini. It's too much a pain to update and setup on the PI. The UnRaid Server has a parity disk so if a drive goes bad data is protected and the interface is nice. I prefer to have a DVR record the channel I want and sometimes in really bad weather I will record the same show on 2 channels (say CBS 4.1 Boston and CBS 12.1 Providence) at the same time. We have some Low VHF channels here, they sold us (OTA Viewers) out for the money and since then OTA is not as good as it was before in some cases. The only smart feature we use is Smart Playlist to organize recording by show. I do need to work on our antenna, a DB4e which I put up when everything went to UHF. Thinking of 2 maybe one for the Boston Stations and one for Providence. I'm currently analyzing signal strength and quality.

#45

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I have Channels installed on an old PC that I put to sleep every night. I've been using it for years, along with an Apple TV as a client, with no problem whatsoever.
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That's good to hear. Thanks.

#46

Passes can be padded to compensate for this. If you have passes set up for everything, the only thing you need to keep an eye on is if a show may not have been flagged as new.

#47

All of my passes for Sunday recordings have 1 hour padding at the end.

#48

I have passes for these shows. I have added 60 minutes (in the pass definition) to each of these shows. This always covers it for me. For auto races, I have to add 2 hours to be safe.

#49

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