Recommended Hardware Specs

Channels DVR Server
#1

I’m considering a move to Channels DVR from Windows Media Center. I’m lucky in that my area has limited DRM on the channels. Currently I’m running the DVR on my Synology DS 916+ NAS, but I frequently will record 8 - 9 simultaneous programs and watch a couple more during that time. I don’t think my NAS will have enough horsepower for that, so for a setup like that (I would have 6 clients in my house that may all be on watching something different at a given time), what would the recommended system specs be? I was thinking maybe a mac mini with an i5 and 16gb of RAM? I’d need a place to store a few TB of recordings as well, so I’d likely get a large external drive to hook to it for inital storage and then transcode the recordings off onto my NAS and then remove them from the server. I do have a full gig wired network at my house.

Thoughts on this setup/approach?

#2

Depends on how you’re playing it back. If you’re doing it on your local network with the Channels app (or an app like Infuse or MrMC) then you won’t have a problem with your NAS. If you’re doing it with Plex or remotely with Channels where it’s doing hardware transcoding, I’m not really sure how many streams it would be able to do before it couldn’t keep up.

I use a DS1815+ and it runs fine recording 6 things and watching 2, but that’s all local.

#3

I have a Mac mini 2012 i7 2.3 ghz with 16gb and a 1tb hard drive and 1.5 tb hard drive and a toshiba 5tb external drive. I record many shows simultaneously. I think 16GB is overkill and I need the horsepower to transcode to x265 and put them in my iTunes library. I let the original recordings expire. I would recommend the i7 quad core for transcoding.

#4

The mac mini hasn’t been updated in years… it’s hard to recommend it to anyone. An Intel NUC would be a good choice. See other threads in the #channels-dvr:hardware category. Though, honestly, the NAS you have will probably work just fine.

#5

I would have one remote transcode going at once, that would be all. Thanks for the feedback everybody, I have some things to think about for sure!

#6

Then your current NAS should work perfectly fine with hardware transcoding. The rest is just sending/saving bits around and that’s not very intensive.