I’m looking at using Channels DVR on an admittedly undersized server (embedded Atom C2358 dual-core 1.7GHz CPU, 4GB memory). I’ve tested it and it is not capable of transcoding in realtime. So my question is: do all clients need transcoding, or do some clients allow using the native MPEG2 stream without transcoding at the server? In particular, I’m looking at an (as yet unpurchased) nVidia Shield TV as my primary client and would like to use that to view the native stream from Channels DVR without transcoding.
Most of our clients play the stream directly and do not require transcoding. This includes the SHIELD.
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You may want to consider using the Shield as your DVR server and client. I have a 4TB WD Elements Portable HD attached and it’s worked great for me with both transcoding and commercial skip. It’s worth a try. 
As a follow-up to this, I have both a FireTV 1 and Nvidia Shield TV that are playing native streams from this obscenely underpowered DVR server and it works just fine (aside from some FireTV quirks unrelated to the DVR). The DVR resource requirements are actually very low if you don’t need to do transcoding for web clients.