Kodi Community Forum

Hello everyone,

I'm quite new this and wanna make sure I got this right before I start purchasing hardware.

From what I can make of this, I can use VDR as a backend for several Kodi front ends. For VDR I need a full ubuntu install (can't use a headless server) and a TBS6618 DVB-C TV Tuner CI PCIe card. This card here.

On the other side of things, I can use a Raspberry Pi with Xbian for the front end.

The only thing I haven't looked into yet are controllers and how the VDR receives the programming guide.

Am I understanding this right? Would this be a good set up?

You are understanding fine, although you are not limited to VDR. Linux can also user tvheadend or mythtv.

There are basically two methods of getting EPG.

1. Digital TV channels carry EIT information that contains the EPG. Your backend can harvest this. SOme providers do a better job than others of providing good EPG over EIT. Some are crap. For example your children will be annoyed if you missed recording Doctor Who because some idiot at the TV company called it Dr Who, or "All New Doctor Who".

2. There are various xmltv providers. xmltv is a standard way of describing epg data. You can set up an xmltv provider to feed into your backend. Often this data is scraped from websites or harvested from EIT feeds then tidied up to get rid of the errors like I described above.

3. Actually there is a 3, in North America there is Schedules Direct a cheap subscription service with very high quality data, but as you are using DVB-C I guess that isn't likely to be you.