Hi,
I’m looking into setting up Channels DVR and need some advice on recommended hardware for use with one or two HDHomeRuns and a single Apple TV. I’m in the UK and would like to have commercial skipping enabled.
It seems like a lot of people use a Mac mini - would this be best for my requirements, and if so what spec, or would a NAS be enough?
I would start with what hardware you have that can stay on the network 24/7. If you need to buy new and you just want a single purpose device, then a NAS would be good for that.
Personally, the Raspberry Pi 3 set up I have works a treat - Jessie lite (headless), 64gb sd card (Wait for Amazon to have a lightening deal on SD cards), a case and an official rPi power supply, all in roughly £50. Mostly importantly, no fan so completely silent.
Runs 24/7, commercial detection works (Still trying to get an idea of timings but roughly an hour or so for a 60mins program). I only watch the recordings on the aTV so don’t need to worry about transcoding.
Hope this helps.
Hey, I’m interested by this setup but I don’t know much about Rasberry Pi’s. What OS are you running on?
So the OS is ‘Raspbian’ which is managed by the Raspberry foundation. Jessie is the latest version and to keep things simple and the lowest possible overheads, I use the ‘Lite’ version.
Download and instructions can be found at https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/
I personally used SSH to access/control the rPi via the laptop but you can just plug in a keyboard and HDMI lead if you prefer. With the DVR using Bonjour, no need to worry about changing to a static IP address.
Hope this helps.