Two houses, two DVRs. Can't connect remotely

Channels DVR Server
#1

I have two houses with a Synology NAS running Channels at each house. Both work great locally.

But when I'm at House A and want to connect remotely to House B, I go to connect "Away From Home", log into my House B account, enter the number, and my AppleTV points to my local (House A), not what I want.

I've tried turning off Bonjour in my Channels settings, I've tried turning off Bonjour on my Synology.

The only way I can connect remotely is to shutdown my local Synology NAS. But as soon as I startup my local Synology NAS, my AppleTV switches back to the local Channels.

How do I make this work? And if I can get it to work, is there an easier way to switch between the two DVRs other than going through the whole "connect" method.

Thanks
Doug

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#2

I think Apple has a problem overriding for a local lan connection. I think you would have better luck if you set the router at one house to a different subnet. Example House a 192.168.1.1 house b 192.168.50.1

There is not a more convenient way to change accounts with tvOS iOS. Android you could use the regular app for one and the beta app for the other on the same device. But Apple apps share the settings with both apps so that won’t work

#3

House A and house B are on different subnets, not sure how that factors into this issue though.

#4

Maybe you could setup Guest wifi access on your router that is isolated from your local network, then you could connect your Apple TV. Of course, if you are using ethernet on the Apple TV, you would probably need to disconnect it at least temporarily.

#5

Thanks for confirming this won’t help. Like @Michael_Birk mentions a guest WiFi my be the only solution. I do know that even with a vpn it will always choose the local dvr.

#6

Have you thought about using tailscale?

#7

I don't see how tailscale will help connect from the AppleTV to my remote DVR, maybe this will work at some point.

The problem seems to be that the AppleTV software always connects to the local DVR no matter what. I'm disappointed this can't be done without shutting down my local DVR. This is a pain for me and just about impossible for my wife to do.

Kinda stinks since I naively spent money on hardware to do this and bought another channels subscription assuming I could just connect to my remote DVR.

#8

If you never want it to connect to the local DVR, you can disable bonjour on your DVR and then delete/reinstall the app so it doesn't know about the local server.

Tailscale would probably also work here because the server on the VPN would appear local and override the other locally found server.

#9

I want to connect to my local server sometimes and to the remote sometimes. Deleting the AppleTV app each time I want to switch is a pain.

I'll try Tailscale when it's available for Channels on the AppleTV. It would be really nice if you could easily switch between servers, Tailscale or not.

#10

I just tried the AppleTV beta and tailscale looks very interesting. But again, it would be nice to have a way to quickly switch which DVR you want to connect rather than typing in the ip each time.

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#11

Atm it might be easier to just buy a $20 Onn android tv and use it for one server and the atv for the other. Then all you have to do is switch tv inputs to switch servers.

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#12
#13

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