Suggestions on setting my media environment

Hi, first of all thank you for such a great product! Channels is easy to use (it passes the wife test), clean and fast. Good job!

My setup is quite typical: Souped-up Synology NAS as media server, Fire TV sticks 4K on all our TVs, HDHomeRun Prime for cable. Now, we have a bunch of movies and tv shows converted to MKV on our NAS. What would you recommend in terms of using as few apps as possible to "consume" all our media: shows recorded by Channels, MKV files, photos, etc? So far I've been jumping back and forth between Kodi and Channels, depending on what I wanted to watch. Are there any plans to extend Channels to also play MKV files in my media library so that I wouldn't need to do that? Or, what would you recommend to simplify this process and make it wife-proof :slight_smile:

Also, on a related note. Can someone share their solution for transcoding Channels' MPEG files into MKV (after they have been recorded)? My Synology can handle it, and I've seen a few different approaches (involving Docker, HandBrakeCLI, or ffmpeg). I would like to setup a task that watches the Recordings folder and converts those files to save space on my NAS.

Thank you,
Joe

My personal setup is this:

  1. HDHomeRun Prime
  2. Ubuntu Server running Channels DVR
  3. 8TB of storage
  4. Plex running on that Ubuntu Server
  5. Sonarr for TV shows media management

I have a Windows 10 VM running on KVM/QEMU. This is running MCEBuddy. The VM has no external network access so I don't have to worry about updates or whatever. MCEBuddy takes the MPG file from Channels and changes the container it into an MKV file with Chapter markers added. Then it puts the file in a directory that Sonarr sees and grabs the file, to rename and move into my Plex folders. You can also transcode if you want but doing that on a VM is a recipe for disaster.

The hardest part of all of this was trying to find a good way to make this work. I finally settled on the Win10 VM set to autostart and auto shutdown. All it does is run MCEBuddy for the chapter marker insertion, so I only have it using a few gigs of RAM on the server.

Thank you for sharing your setup. I'm going to try the Windows VM route as a container for MCEBuddy to do the repackaging. I've been using it on another computer for quite a while and I'm impressed with its performance. Your setup solves the "multiple app" problem (for consuming the media). Once MCEBuddy moves the recordings from Channels to the appropriate folder, I'll be able to use just Kodi for everything. Genius!