Kodi Community Forum

Hi guys!

Some help very much appreciated here!

I've recently moved into a flat with both a standard digital tv feed and five extra satellite channels through the same cable. My LG 32LS4600 picks up the standard free channels' names and EPG and saves them as DTV channels 1-30. The five sky channels come through as TV channels 1-5, without names and with no EPG or red button functionality.

I'm looking at options for scheduled recording of tv shows and films and saving them to a hard disc. Ideally the solution will speak to my existing home setup (currently in the UK and shipping to NZ late 2013). The functionality to record those five sky channels is a must, as I'm a big EPL fan and the matches tend to be on at ridiculous hours in the morning.

Back in the UK I have a series of squeezebox mounted O2 jogglers (for networked music), a 6TB media server running UNRAID and the squeezebox server software, and a couple of AppleTV2s running XBMC for video.

I guess my absolute ideal would therefore be an XBMC solution with a dual tv tuner and some sort of add in to allow me to use it as a PVR - perhaps based on the Raspberry Pi platform. But would this let me record those channels that don't pick up the EPG? Could I 'teach' the software which channels they are? Or do I need an entirely different solution to get this to work?

Thanks so much in advance for any and all help!

It sounds like those extra channels are coming through as analogue signals - I presume your leaseholder is decoding these and putting them through a modulator and piping them into the flats so they appear as "regular" channels. So, to do anything with those, you need an analogue tuner - these are pretty dumb things, but that would work in your favour here, since any tuner could simply "tune to channel xx" and you'd get the signal. You can test that with an old pre-Freeview PVR if you or a friend has one lying around.

Anyway, I digress a little - if they are analogue channels then you simply need an analogue tuner that's supported by whatever backend you choose to go for. Or just leave that old PVR plugged in and record things the old-fashioned way...

Thanks Prof - that sounds awesome. A little reassurance that it's not automatically impossible goes a long way! Unfortunately, I'm recently emigrated to a new country and I don't know anyone with a PVR here, let alone a pre-digital one. That said, my understanding of what's happened here is precisely as you describe it - the sky channels show up as analogue signal to my tv (hence TV channels as opposed to DTV).

Stupid question alert: are tuners backward compatible, or would I need to get a separate tuner for the analogue channels to the digital channels? And/or is that something I can do in XBMC?

I've been looking round and I guess my ultimate would be a combination network media player (not necessarily music, as I have the jogglers for that) with live tv, pvr and dvd/bluray functionality from within the same programme (ideally xbmc). Can it be done? You know what they say - aim for the stars and all that

Hardware wise I'm looking at the gorgeous but decidedly costly Acer Revo RL100 (http://www.amazon.com/Acer-RL100-U1002-D...revo+rl100) though the only video demo I've seen shows it booting first into windows and then into xbmc. It might sound like a weird limiter to place on my requirements, but that doesn't really work too well for me - I'd like the option to boot into xbmc directly (openelec?) and quickly (<5 secs) without losing the optical and tuner functionality. I think I may be asking for the moon on a stick here...

No, tuners aren't backwards compatible - you'd need something that specifically handles analogue signals. I'll sit here now and hope that someone who has one will chime in, since I've never used one so have no experience. I'd expect them to be well-supported under Windows or Linux, that said, simply because of their likely age. You may need to squint around on the 'net to find something, perhaps USB-connected for simplicity - that Acer isn't blessed with much in the way of internal expansion if nothing else.

To get all this working will need some more reading. Live TV in the XBMC world is a client-server model, so XBMC is the client and you can choose from a plethora of backends as the server (tvheadend, MythTV, VDR, YaVDR, Next PVR, Argus 4TR...) - have a look in this forum for more. You can run both client and server on the same box, though, so it's by no means impossible to have an all-in-one device. DVD is pretty well supported, but Blu-ray is a different matter - there are ways and means, but it's not as simple as "stick it in the drive and press play", especially not on Linux (DRM protection doesn't play nicely with FOSS concepts).

XBMC is only a program, remember, so the demo you've seen is simply the RL100 booting into Windows and then starting XBMC. That works fine for many people. For a more appliance-ey feel, you have XBMCbuntu and OpenElec, both of which are modified Linux distros that boot straight into XBMC - the former is more flexible since it's a full (l)Ubuntu platform, the latter is faster because... well, because it's not. If speed is paramount, you're probably looking at tvheadend and OpenElec on the same box - if you can find a tuner that's supported natively in Linux (look for V4l support) then what you're after is perfectly doable, bar some challenges around optical drives.