[Beefus]

Hi All,

I'm after some advice (as the subject cleverly suggests).

My current setup is a Shuttle PC with a 2x Hauppauge S2 Satellite card, Ubuntu 10.4, TVHeadend backend and a version of XBMC I found on here somewhere with the TVHeadend addon, all of my movies, music & recorded TV are stored on a Windows Home Server with a lot of storage space.

This setup has served purpose however I am now thinking that I should start refining it a little, I currently have two boxes turned on all the time the home server for storage (and other functions not specific to this) and my shuttle for recording TV. What I ideally want to end up with is one of these on all the time dealing with everything and the other (the media box) only being turned on when I am watching movies / tv.

I have considered the option of moving my TV cards to my home server and setting up a virtual PC with Ubuntu or similar installed running TVHeadend and streaming to my media box when it is is turned on. I don't however know how this will work.

Any advice / suggestions on what I can to here would be greatly appreciated.

[linuxluemmel]

If your sat-card is a pci-device or pci-express device a virtual os will not work.
It may work if it would be a USB box ...
I do run mythtv with hauppauge hdpvr for testing with a virtual-box .....

[esdubu]

Take a look at this thread, it's more to do with Windows Media Center 7 but the principle should remain the same for the WHS tuner farm bit.

I'm looking into doing this myself soon.

http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/t/78625.aspx

[Beefus]

I half suspected that a PCI or PCIe device wouldn't work on a virtual OS, shame as that would have been the easiest solution for me...

Thanks for that link esdubu, looks like that might be the route forwards for me...

[kortina]

This is where the HDHomeRun is a great idea.

It is a network based TVTuner.

Only issue at the moment is that TVHeadEnd doesn't support it.


I have a similar situation, my NAS (Win2008R2) has all of the storage, but probably won't stream TV. I can run a virtual Linux machine, and have it connect to the HDHomeRun.

I am thinking of yaVDR, but waiting till Dhama is out and yaVDR seems like a long term project.

[poofyhairguy]

This is where the HDHomeRun is a great idea.

I have loved mine.

Only issue at the moment is that TVHeadEnd doesn't support it.

Which is a big problem because apparently the PVR branch is centering around TVheadend.

[hepi]

hdhomerun can be used with VDR via vdr-plugin-hdhomerun.
It's quite easy to setup with yaVDR like I explained here:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=606104&postcount=4

[kingoftowns]

second the poster that recommended MythTV, its a much more involved setup than anything MS based but it will do everything you are looking for, the way it handles recording from tuners is awesome and it will all be done on the server with no need to leave your clients on.

[poofyhairguy]

MythTV is awesome for what it is (especially for us Americans as it has really good ATSC support), but it seems to be a dead end in XBMCland. From what I understand the PVR branch will use TVheadend or VDR as the backend instead of the more popular MythTV.

[Harry deluxe]

I attach my issue as well here:

I am in a similar situation. I have a WHS which I want to use as TV-Server for my XBMC. I dont have any TVcard yet.

What solution would you recommand me?

[kingoftowns]

http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=MythTV

if you need a way to record and store from a tuner and serve that up to clients without the clients needing to be on for any of the recording, MythTV should be fine.