[RStephen]

Greetings... From the US,,,
I am in the process of creating a RPi 2 based whole house entertainment system. This is the beginning of my journey.
My ultimate system would have the ability to do the following.

1. KODI open source media player.
2. PVR (personal video player).
3. Audio/Image storage/playback.
4. Add additional rooms.

This is a lot to expect so with keeping in mind the end result, I can now build the system one segment at a time. Hopefully...
I have the following items arriving this week.
a. Raspberry Pi 2.
b. 1a 5v power supply.
c. appropriate case to house the Raspberry into.
d. 8g class 10 sd card.
e. HDMI cable
f. wireless keyboard/mouse

From my misc computer parts pile I have available the following
a. Seagate 320gb Free Agent "GO" external hard drive.
b. Powered USB 4 port Hub.


My first question is...
1. Is a second Raspberry PI 2 used when creating a backend PVR?

[Jönke]

If you want , but you can run the backend on the first pi. Look for tvheadend , vdr .

[noggin]

Yep - in Europe there are many of us running backends and frontends on the same Pi with USB DVB tuners. The Pi was a bit marginal, but the Pi 2 is pretty good for a single/dual tuner set-up.

I think the US OTA Linux-supported USB tuner market is quite a lot smaller than the DVB market, but many people run HD Homeruns instead AIUI (where the HD Homerun is an Ethernet-based tuner solution)

[RStephen]

Hmmm... The only reason I was thinking of running two RPi2's was to prevent stressing out the front end processor. Overkill?


In US especially where I am located OTA is very limited but would be necessary for local coverage. Any suggestions for a good OTA Tuner for use in the USA?

[wrxtasy]

I have already tested out the RPi2 as a backend TvHeadend server and also using it a a Kodi TV client. It will be fine. The RPi2 has 4 CPU cores to spread the load around after all and video is using the VPU/GPU with Hardware decoding.
TvHeadend is not very CPU intensive at all either.

Testing details here: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid1944448

Possible ATSC tuners here: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid1945782

RPi2 and TvHeadend server setup here: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid1965585

[katsup]

I wonder how a mythtv back end would run. I'm tempted to move this over to a pi 2.

[noggin]

Only real issue with the Pi 2 is that all the USB and Network IO hang off a single USB 2.0 bus.

If you have a USB 2.0 hard drive, USB 2.0 tuner and are sending content over the network to a remote client whilst recording then that bus gets quite busy (TV tuner output, Hard drive Recording Ethernet streaming - taking up at least 3x the bandwidth of the signal you are receving - which for a US ATSC HD service could be 12Mbs+ x 3), particularly with HD content.

Ironically, if you run the front-end and back-end on the same device you reduce this a bit as you don't need to use bandwidth for network streaming.

If you have a significant number of tuners and require more than one drive and multiple services to be streamed at the same time I'd probably look for a different platform for the back-end (something with GigE and SATA or USB 3.0 or multiple USB 2.0 buses)

For a single tuner though the Pi 2 will be fine for combined back-end/front-end duties. Just don't expect to run 4 x DVB-S2 tuners and 4 x DVB-T2 tuners on it! (Which the OP won't as they are in the US)