[fitzy89]

Hi guys

Been looking for a TV streaming box for a while now, something compact and low power so I've moved away from a PC-based server these days (and my current DVB-S card isn't supported by Linux).

Has anyone tried these Moi+ boxes? They seem low cost and would be perfect to fit in my entertainment rack.

http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/...53326.html

Ideally I want a nice EPG with channel logos in XBMC/Kodi (I'm using Gotham 13.2 on OpenElec at the moment but can upgrade if needed), Ability to record would be nice but not essential. At the moment I'm only looking to watch free to air channels but an ability to upgrade at a later date to paid channels would be nice but again not essential and I could live without it.

Ideally if I can get a suitable streaming box for under £150 it would be good, I'm happy to get a used unit from ebay or elsewhere.

Kind regards
Rob

[birdwatcher]

There is a review of them at https://freetoairamerica.wordpress.com/2...signals-2/

I was looking at them several months ago and this is what I learned...

They are nice little devices but two things to keep in mind, one is that you can only use a compatible TBS tuner card inside, and the other is that while their firmware includes several different types of software, if you plan to use TVHeadEnd just be aware that it might still be a rather old version.

You cannot get paid channels with it if you live in the USA or Canada, etc. You can get paid channels if there is a model of TBS tuner card that supports the type of conditional access (CA) card used in your area (so probably most of Europe and possibly parts of Asia/Australia/NZ, but I am not certain). But that is a limitation of the TBS tuner cards, not of this device. I'm guessing you live somewhere in Britain due to your use of the £ symbol for currency, in that case you should be okay assuming you gat a TBS card with a CA slot and plug in a compatible card.

While you can record with them by connecting a drive to an internal connector and providing an external power source for the drive, it is rather finicky about which drives it will accept. With any given drive, it might work great or it might act like it isn't there. The guy who told me that said that there seemed to be no particular pattern as to which drives it would accept, it was just luck of the draw.

Still it seems like a good deal if you are not wanting to run a full size computer, particularly if your primary interest is in steaming live TV. I ultimately opted to build my own backend, but only because I wanted to use multiple tuner cards and I wanted to be able to choose which version of the TVHeadEnd software I run. But ultimately that wound up costing a lot more than what this unit plus a card will cost you, so if it does what you want I'd say go for it.

[fitzy89]

Thanks birdwatcher for the info that's very useful. TBS cards won't be an issue I'll buy one of those to suit it. Shame I can't use my current tuner (Pinnacle 7010ix) as it's not supported under any flavour of linux but no big deal I'll bung that on ebay soon.

I live in the UK/Britain as you say yes so the paid provider for us would be Sky, doubt I'd ever sign up to them due to the cost but it's nice to have the option just in case.

I work in IT myself so have got access to many types and sizes of hard drives and memory sticks, I'm sure I'll be able to find one that works, I suspect the problems others were having may be related to filesystem or power requirements of the drive which is quite common on many embedded devices such as this.

What would I be losing out on from running the older version of TVHeadEnd? I've never tried it before due to my current tuner not being compatible, is there anything significant that the older versions lack? All I really want is a nicely laid out EPG, preferably with categories (movies, music, kids, documentaries, sports) etc, I don't mind having to configure the categories myself if necessary similar to Sky (the main satellite provider in the UK) which looks like this: https://cdn.recombu.com/digital/images/n...101887.png

I'll have a read through on that review you mentioned but so far it looks pretty good

[birdwatcher]

There really isn't much difference in earlier versions of TVHeadEnd where DVB-S2 is concerned. Newer versions might be a bit more stable but I used the 3.9 branch for many months when it was out and only recently updated to the 4.0 branch, and there really isn't much difference. You might not be able to use the pipe filter in a URL (to run a live stream through ffmpeg or to acquire an IPTV stream), that was only introduced somewhere in the 3.9 series, but I doubt you'd need that over there anyway.

Keep in mind that the layout of the EPG will be mostly determined by your frontend software, such as Kodi, and that different Kodi skins might alter the layout a bit. I don't know about categories, generally speaking we don't get them here but then again that's because in North America the FTA signals are not intended for home reception, so we don't get EPG information transmitted in the satellite signals themselves, You guys do get that (and far enough out into the future to actually be useful, not just the day or two we get on our over-the-air channels) and you may well get categories as part of that. The good news for you is that there are many more people already using systems such as what you contemplate in your part of the world, so once you have it set up you should be able to get help tweaking it to look the way you want. I have seen screenshots of Kodi where different categories are shown as different colors in the grid; again I think to a large degree that depends on the skin you choose.

Now if you are talking about the TVHeadEnd web interface, there is no grid view there. You can search for upcoming programs using various filters, including a "content type" filter, but the results are in a list view, not a grid view. I think I recall reading somewhere that there used to be some type of add-on or external program that could be used with TVHeadEnd to provide a grid view in the web interface, but I was never sufficiently motivated to install it and now I don't remember what it was called anymore. Sorry.