TheGreenButton - Windows Media Center Forums

https://getchannels.com

This seems to be gaining steam rather quickly. Lots of disgruntled HomeRun DVR Kickstarter doners are on board. They've started a community for the DVR project. Of course, no DRM support yet.

Hmmm...reason enough to keep my AppleTV 3 that I never use?

What Apple TV is this supported on? I'm not familiar with those models.

"watch live linear TV on some device".

Yawn. I can't believe anyone spent any time on something like this.

adam1991 wrote:"watch live linear TV on some device".

Yawn. I can't believe anyone spent any time on something like this.

I don't see things like this replacing something as robust as WMC or TiVo but I do think more apps and devices supporting HD Homerun is a good thing.

I would look at something like this to add a tv in a spare room, garage, basement etc. I have a Roku in these areas already but adding something that has a better live tv interface would just be a bonus.

Disclaimer: I'm a Channels developer

Hey guys, come check out what we've done in the time since this thread got started. Our DVR is fully shipped and has tons of fans. It's fully featured and works on any platform you throw it at.

While yes, Channels alone is a linear TV app, it turns into a full fledged DVR when you set up Channels DVR on a computer/nas on your home network. All management is through the app and it includes remote viewing as well. Even as a linear TV app without the DVR add on, people really love being able to watch most of their content via streaming apps while still being able to drop in on live events like sports and award shows, all without having to change any inputs. We're pretty happy with the results and so is everyone else in the community.


Give us a look!

I haven't seen any comments on this thread for a while and thought that WMC users might benefit from hearing the experience of a longtime WMC user (>7 years) and what the functionality of this product looks like today as opposed to a couple years ago when it was first mentioned here. As "the end" approached, I maintained WMC on Win7, but experimented with other options like NextPVR, MediaPortal, JellyFin, Emby. I found all of them to be inferior to WMC and never made the switch. I'm not really sure if it was the quality of the recording or the way it played back, but both the audio and video weren't quite as good as WMC. They probably could have been considered good enough to live with, but why switch when WMC was still working and satisfying all my needs. Well, recently the power supply finally went out on my Windows 7 pc. I've ordered a new power supply, but wanted to get something up and running and have been meaning to check out Channels DVR. I figured this was a prime opportunity. I subscribed and installed. I have to say I'm really impressed so far. The quality is awesome and performance is great so far too. There is no Kodi integration which means I have to use 1 application for TV and another for links or locally-stored content, but I can live with that. The UI takes a little getting used to, but it's snappy and nice-looking. There is an import option (in beta) for recordings made on other platforms and it works with WMC. The results are a bit hit or miss, but they do come over and give you a way to assign each file to the correct season/episode and artwork. The recording engine has been flawless so far. The only gripes I have so far over WMC are that it doesn't play copy-protected content (like HBO recordings), doesn't offer a way to resolve conflicts (other than setting priority, but offers no warning that conflicts exist), and that there is no predefined way to tell it always to make all recordings default to the HD channel. You can specify what channel you want it to record on, but you have to know what that is and punch it in. It will tell you if there are 2 and what the associated numbers are, so it's not a huge deal, but one extra step that WMC did for me. It's worth pointing out that the $80/year subscription cost (I know, not exactly cheap) does include 14 days of gracenote guide data, so if you're already subscribing to Schedules Direct in order to use EPG123 on WMC, that eliminates a $30/yr cost bringing it down to effectively $50/year. There is also built-in skip detection that lets you choose if you want to be prompted or automatically skip as opposed to messing with 3rd party options and configuration. It just works out of the box. I also like that it runs on Windows 10 and doesn't require me to keep an extra Win7 computer running in my closet. Unless I start to run into hiccups with reliability or find issues that I haven't experienced within my first 2 days of experience, I think this may be my new longterm solution.

FYI: Schedules Direct is $25/year not $30/year

Thanks for the fact-check Space. I was guessing. Probably should have confirmed before posting. I am currently subscribed, but it’s been a while since I last paid it. I guess that makes it effectively $55 if you were an SD subscriber and can let that lapse as a result.
Still not a bad deal compared to cable companies that want to hit you with $10-15 per tv for dvr capability.