Safari on iPhone is buffering too.
What kind of NAS?
Home built running raid5 with Open Media Vault os (debian flavor).
Question: does watching live tv put any resource load on the NAS (where channels dvr is installed) or does it simply pass through the the stream from the HDHomerun.
By default live tv does not go through the DVR. If you enable Tuner Sharing, it does a simple passthrough and uses very few resources.
I will try turning on tuner sharing. At one point I remember seeing this as an option but I can't seem to find it now.
How do I turn this on?
It's in the DVR settings on the client. Also, since it's a client option, it must be set on each client. (Don't forget, the tuner priority listing must also be the same on the DVR as the client setting tuner sharing to on, otherwise it won't actually share the tuners with the DVR.)
Found it. Went to settings on my Apple TV and turned it on.
The web client streaming seems to be better.
So with the priority, I just have one HDHomerun 4 tuner, so having the tuner shaing on everything should be okay right? I never changed any of the priority settings from default.
The web player does put a lot of load on the DVR. It has to convert the video into a web browser compatible format using a video transcoder.
The official clients don't need to do that, and can use the tuner sharing option or turn it off for direct connections.
If both safari and chrome are buffering, that seems to suggest the transcoder is having issues on your NAS. Is it set to hardware or software transcoding in the web UI settings?
Software. There you go. Thanks!
Is there a negative to having tuner sharing turned on?
My network is pretty fast.
If everything is hardwired and fast, no problems with tuner sharing are expected.
See if you can load the i915 driver to enable QuickSync and take advantage of Hardware transcoding with your Intel CPU.
Thank you! I really appreciate your help, and I love Channels.
From my reading the QucikSync deal is more than I want to get into at this point.
I did change my graphics settings to 'Quality' and that seems to have cleared up some of the buffering, at least for now. Thanks again!
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All you should need for quick sync is "modprobe i915"
This commad is to run on the NAS correct? Command not found.
If that's the case, maybe try using the full path: /sbin/modprobe i915
Please remember that since you're accessing the kernel, you need root privileges, so you'll likely need to pass the command through sudo, so you're looking at something more like:
# /sbin/modprobe i915
or
$ sudo /sbin/modprobe i915
(Note: the leading # or $ is to denote the shell prompt, with # implying a root shell, and $ representing the shell prompt of a non-root user.)
Thanks guys. I've run it. This should help with transcoding load?
Only if:
- The device running Channels DVR has an Intel processor with integrated graphics that supports Intel's QuickSync feature; and,
- You have set the Transcoder to "Hardware" in the Settings page of th Channels DVR's web interface.
Also, please note that modprobe does not ensure that the kernel module is loaded. To verify that the module has indeed been loaded and enabled, check the output of lsmod | grep i915. If that command produces no output, then the module did not get loaded and you cannot access hardware-assisted transcoding. If that command does give you output, but Channels does not offer a "Hardware" Transcoder on its Settings page, then perhaps you need to restart the Channels DVR server.
another dumb question. how do I restart channels dvr?
I just rebooted the NAS but the modprobe i915 does not come back after a reboot.
After running 'modprobe i915' and running lsmod | i915, I do get some output so that part is good.
The process of restarting Channels (and other services on your NAS) varies based upon your model, its OS, and which process management/supervision/init system it uses. (Similarly, the way in which you can set modprobe i915 to run after reboot varies across the same differences.)
On Debian based systems, you'll want to do something like (as root):
echo i915 > /etc/modutils/quicksync
update-modules
and then it should autoload at boot.