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You can of course do whatever you want, but understand that the software assumes that it will always be running and available. So you'll just have to plan around that on your end.
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That's why I'm asking how it responds.
Easy Question I would think.
I need to have a wife proof solution.
Can't count on her shutting the ATV down.
If the Client ran on desktop I would have no problem since it can all be scripted but I can't do that on IOS.
Shutting down the Apple TV is no problem; that's the client device. The device running the DVR—the server—is what should be always on.
Or am I misunderstanding your question. If no DVR is found in the network, then the app on the client device is useless.
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Or am I misunderstanding your question
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Maybe.
If the ATV and Client app is running and the Server (Unraid NAS) and DVR, which is in a Docker, goes off line.
Will the client App crash or Just give a message that the Server can't be found and exit nicely or just wait for the Server to come back on line, etc?
Not to confuse the above,
but I am hoping when my wife shuts down the TV and ATV with the ATV remote that will be the end of it, but she may just shut the TV off (years of doing that may be hard to retrain) and the ATV will still be running and server will shut down at 2:30 AM or Docker will go off line.
The app will present a message saying it could not discover a local server. You can then tell it to retry, or attempt to manually connect with a specific IP address. But no, the app won't crash.
Then when you next attempt to open the Channels app, it will just complain about not finding a server.
Thanks for the reply.
BlockquoteThen when you next attempt to open the Channels app, it will just complain about not finding a server.
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Even though the server will be running the next time the Channels App is opened?
Again it needs to be easy for my wife to reopen next day without jumping through hoops to reconnect.
Many of us have wives who are very untechnical and would give us grief if we made things too complex. I have not seen anything an untrained user can do to mess up the system.
No, it will only complain when it can't find the server. If the server is back up when the app is re-opened, you won't notice any difference.
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 
Or instead of putting channels on the nas put it on the Mac mini and never shut it down. Honestly, you are causing more wear and tear on the nas shutting down and restarting daily then just leaving it on.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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. 
How we doing on that metric?
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.
Channels DVR does exceptionally well in this regard.
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 
)
