Talk to me about Remote DVR upkeep

Here's what I'd like to do:

  • Watch football
  • sitting on a couch
  • from a different market
  • less-than-live. both starting from the beginning while its still ongoing and starting it after its complete. This requires some skipping control, to skip commercials and to maybe jump through the 30 sec between snaps

There are a couple of family member who live in the intended market, so I can put some hardware there to make this work.

I am wary though, because the more complicated the remote setup, the better chance that it needs some administration that I would also need to do remotely.

I'd love to have the channels DVR running on my local mac mini and have a tuner across a VPN to the remote site. this also seems the cheapest. I have an Ubiquiti Amplifi wifi system, and they have this "teleport" product thats a plug and play VPN back to your home network, and that seems pretty no-fuss, but the max speed of that setup is 17mbps, which seems to me to be tight for streaming.

Can someone convince me that having the DVR server be remote, on a ds218+ will be reliable, or reasonably remotely fixable, to make this work? Do the skip ahead controls work responsively remotely?

Both sites have good suburban internet connections, though i should run a test to confirm the remote upload speed

The 17mbps could be the main issue. I assume you are saying that the UPLINK Speed of the remote site is 17mbps or something like that. I am running Remote DVR multiple hours per day and works fine. But I have a 200/200 internet speed. When streaming OTA Channels (mpeg2) the required uplink speed (without compression) is around 16mbps. If I put a load on my DVR Server (DS1019+) it would be much smaller but then I have the load on the server which I like to avoid. However, the TVE Channels are much less. Like around 3-4mbps. This is more like the compressed size without compression and the overhead of that. So, it depends on which channels you want to send but it is pretty easy to test. Just use your phone to connect to your home over Cellular or someone else wifi and then check your Resource Monitor on the DS218+. That is the best way to check load. Also, make sure to check you Channels Client App Settings for quality of Remote Streaming.

Also, you can do ADMIN of your DS218+ remotely. No need for a VPN but always helpful especially if you have a DS218+ at the remote side which includes a VPN Server if needed. I have VPN setup on all of my DS's (I have a number of them) and it works very well.

Do you have or know a college student? If so, they can subscribe to NFL Sunday TicketU for $100 for the season. This includes ALL Sunday games. It streams very nicely!

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Did you get this to work in Channels?