[elsmandino]

Hi,

I am in the process of considering a change to a Linux-based server (from Windows) and now need to reconsider which PVR software to use.

I note the options are TVHeadend, VDR, MythTV, DVBLink.

I would be really interested to hear from anyone who tried them all out, what they thought of each and (ultimately), the one they settled on and why.

[himisk71]

I am now in love with TVHeadend, after several years with Mediaportal and the last 1 year with dvbviewer and dvblink.
TVHeadend had the best Android-App, a Webinterface for configurations and the most fast channel changing..

[nickr]

Mythtv is the best that have used. Much better IMHO than tvh.

[oldtvwatcher]

Mythtv is the best that have used. Much better IMHO than tvh.

As the US President-elect would say, "Wrong!"

I have used both. In my opinion, Myth TV is harder to configure than TVHeadend once you learn how to do it. Neither are exactly intuitive, but in my experience Myth TV has two major drawbacks:

First, it will not recognize and utilize DVB-S/S2 satellite TV cards that TVHeadend has no problem with. Oh, it may appear to find the card and will let you try to configure it, but good luck getting it to actually play live video or record from the card. Some people in satellite forums have reported that they somehow got it to work for low bitrate sources, but could never get it to work with the highest bitrate sources. I could not get it to work at all despite days of trying various settings, whereas in TVHeadend my cards just worked (after configuration).

That alone was s show-stopper as far as MythTV was concerned for me, but even when I was just using it for watching OTA stuff from an antenna I found it had some weird issues, particularly if you wanted to use the MythTV frontend on some of your devices. The problem is that the version number of a MythTV backend must match the version number of the MythTV frontend or they won't work together. Now that is surprising because the MythTV PVR plugin for Kodi can work with the current and several previous versions of the backend; it doesn't care. So you may think, well, why not just use Kodi as the frontend all the time? Well, there were two issues there. The first was that the video quality in Kodi seemed much softer than when the same TV channel was played through the MythTV frontend. Maybe that's been fixed in more recent versions, but it was definitely an issue back around the time of Frodo (or whenever PVR addons were first introduced). The other thing I noticed was that the MythTV frontend does a much better job of displaying ATSC closed captions. For some reason Kodi displays everything in the same font and at the same location on the screen, and doesn't seem to show things like italics or musical note symbols, etc., also Kodi often displays single quotes in contractions (like can't or don't) as double quotes, and sometimes chops off the final character on a line. So you have the problem of, do I use Kodi and not have to worry about matching versions but have to settle for a "softer" picture, or the MythTV frontend where if I upgrade the backend or one frontend, I have to do them all, or some of them will stop communicating with each other? And if you are thinking, well, I'll just upgrade my backend and all my frontends at once, remember that in some cases you may need to first upgrade the Linux version you are running, particularly if you are using a repository to get the Myth software.

And if that is not bad enough, another problem with Myth is that the backend configuration runs in a GUI, so you can't run it on s server edition of Debian or Ubuntu, you have to have a desktop version. And if you want to configure it from another machine then you will need to install VNC or some other remote desktop software. Whereas TVHeadend's configuration can be done using a web browser from any system on the local network, and does not require a desktop and all the software bloat that usually accompanies one.

Neither system will be especially simple to configure if you have never done it before, but the MythTV backend configuration program displays a ton of mostly useless settings that can totally confuse a new user.

I ran MythTV for about a year for my OTA reception, before switching that backend to TVHeadend, and I prefer TVHeadend because it seems to provide a sharper picture to Kodi and because I don't need a desktop running on my backend server. And as I say I could never get MythTV to work right with my satellite tuners.

As for VDR, I tried for about half an hour to make heads or tails of it and just couldn't even figure out how to begin. I don't believe it has nearly as many users as TVHeadend, or even Myth. DVBLink is a commercial product with a rather hefty price tag, so I never even gave that a second glance. Too many free options to mess around with pay ones, especially since software written with the European standards in mind doesn't always work so well in Canada and the USA.

[nickr]

As I said, I was offering an opinion, and I still think it is right. But each to their own.

PS one cannot offer a better picture than the other, as they simply copy to disk what the broadcaster sends.

[oldtvwatcher]

As I said, I was offering an opinion, and I still think it is right. But each to their own.

PS one cannot offer a better picture than the other, as they simply copy to disk what the broadcaster sends.

As to your first point, I realize that. It was a lame attempt at humor.

As to your second, please understand that the difference was in the way Kodi played the live or recorded video using the MythTV PVR addon vs. the way the MythTV frontend played it. It could be the exact same video and it would look crisper in the MythTV frontend, and I'm not the only one who thought that at the time, since I showed someone else the difference in how the video played in each and they noticed the same thing. I did that only because I thought maybe I was crazy and there was no actual difference, but the fact that someone else saw it verified that in fact the same source video had better playback in the MythTV frontend. I cannot explain why or how, but it was definitely noticeable.

But this was at least a couple of years ago, maybe three now. So Kodi's playback may have improved since then. Also, I have a newer HTPC now that has a different graphics engine, so that could make a difference.

[AshG]

I used both in the past and found Myth to be the most stable... which i guess is a key attribute, however this was over 18 months ago so TVhead may have matured.

[elsmandino]

Thanks very much for everyone's input - really appreciate it.

It does seem clear that the only two options, really worth considering, are MythTV and TVHeadend.

I was rather hoping that there would a clear favourite but it does seem that both have their fans.

I guess the only option is to do a trial run of both and see how I get on.

Thanks again.

[rpcameron]

I've used both MythTV and Tvheadend. I much prefer TVH as it is coded in pure ANSI C and is much more lightweight than MythTV. In my experiences MythTV is a bit of a resource hog and tries to do too much. Plus, it has a poor native web interface that doesn't even expose all of its options. To remote configure it, you need to install local copies of the Qt5 libraries and then run mythsetup and mythfrontend from remote X sessions if you want full control over your setup and recording rules; not to mention its obfuscated MySQL requirements.

Tvheadend stores all of its config data in plain text/json files, and is fully managed from a very lightweight http interface/server.