Here’s the background: until recently I had PMS running on my synology nas (ds415+ quad core x86 atom cpu), working fine for about round two years. I would occasionally get a popup saying my PMS could not be reached or something while streaming to either an nvidia shield (non-pro) or roku stick. I suspected that was related to transcoding, so a couple of weeks ago I moved over to PMS running on a mac mini (2011 i7 dual core, 8g of ram). Storage still pointed to synology over smb.
Playback for video has improved in general, though I’ve gotten a few popups lately saying my server is not powerful enough to… Eh? I’m not saying that’s the cream of the crop for “servers” but it sure beats my synology for processing power!
That, and DVRing the olympics has been frustrating. I have never used the DVR package until this week. I set all the local OTA NBC airings to record, the first night it recorded perfectly, removed commercials and everything about as well as I could have hoped. Second night, for opening ceremonies, it recorded about an hour then just stopped. Then today the early afternoon airing just didn’t even try to record. In fact, looking at the recording schedule window had nothing set for today.
So I guess my question is, is the DVR operator interface error, or what should I be looking for to troubleshoot? That channel isn’t 100% clear through the HDHomeRun app, but is probably 90-95% artifact free, the HDHR4-2us is hardwired to a cisco smb switch, also on that switch is the synology nas and the mac mini. I do have a few vlans on my network, but the synology is set up to see all 4. The mac and hdhr are all on the same vlan with the nvidia switch.
I’ve tried: looking through the logs, I just see the DVR scheduler trying, then grabbing, then grabbing failed. Not sure if there’s any more info in any other logs. I did move the synology mount over to nfs to see if that would be any more reliable. The hdhr is the latest firmware for that model, I’m running PMS 1.10.1.4602-f54242b6b on OSX 10.11.6 (will update to sierra/high sierra at some point but just didn’t want to change too much that weekend).
In general terms though, if my mac mini isn’t powerful enough to work well watching live TV and/or DVR, what do I need to look for in a server? Would a quad xeon in like a dell t20 be that much better equipped? Or is there a “make this work” button I’m not finding somewhere?
