Setting Up a new Beelink mini PC with Linux

Playground Hardware
#61

Great!! Just curious what does troubleshooting show for your disk io write now that it has been reformatted? That test is probably testing the usb storage so it will never show the 1gb. Originally I didn’t know you were using a USB drive for storage.

#62

I installed Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on a Beelink mini S and I can't get hardware transcode to show up as an option in settings. I installed desktop not server. Any suggestion?

#63

Did you do this ?

  • If you have an Intel processor, make sure you add your user to the video and render groups so the Channels DVR Server transcoder can use /dev/dri for hardware acceleration: sudo adduser $(id -u -n) video && sudo adduser $(id -u -n) render.

Channels — Channels DVR Server (getchannels.com)

#64

Yes, I did that when I did the Channels-dvr install.
Since I posted the question I did a

sudo apt install ffmpeg

Then I rebooted and bingo I see the hardware transcode option and I can view videos in the admin interface.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

#65

I've been under the impression that one wants to use the custom versions of ffmpeg and ffprobe that are hosted on the Channels S3 site. Those are the versions I've been using with OliveTin anyway.

Extracting a few lines from my Dockerfile -- this should get you those builds...

OS=linux
CDVR_RELEASE=$(curl https://channels-dvr.s3.amazonaws.com/latest.txt | tr -d '\n')
CDVR_URL=https://channels-dvr.s3.amazonaws.com
wget -O /usr/bin/ffmpeg ${CDVR_URL}/${CDVR_RELEASE}/ffmpeg-${OS}-x86_64
wget -O /usr/bin/ffprobe ${CDVR_URL}/${CDVR_RELEASE}/ffprobe-${OS}-x86_64
chmod +x /usr/bin/ff*
#66

I thought that no matter which OS install you use, when you install Channels DVR, or do an update to a new pre-release/stable release, that it downloads the latest appropriate Channels DVR versions of ffmpeg/ffprobe and puts them in the executables directory where Channels DVR is installed (channels-dvr/latest).

Also, using ffmpeg-${OS}-x86_64 will only get that specific architecture build

#67

Having to install ffmpeg manually didn't sound right to me either, and @cyoungers might want to figure out why it didn't install with Channels. If he is going to install it manually though, I just wanted him to get the custom version.

1 Like
#68

My guess is that it was the reboot that made hardware available not the ffmpeg. But I could be wrong.

2 Likes
#69

See https://getchannels.com/dvr/setup.sh for how it determines which architecture to download

fetch https://channels-dvr.s3.amazonaws.com/$version/ffmpeg-$os-$arch       channels-dvr/$version/ffmpeg

Just mentioning it in case other users decide to download the AMD64 arch version thinking it's the only one available.

#70

I think you may be right about this.