Kodi Community Forum

To make things more wife friendly, I've ditched my all Windows client setup and moved over to a Vero4K in the kitchen, and 2 Nvidia Shields elsewhere around the house. It would seem that a windows based TV backend is more hassle that it's worth as accessing the SMB storage just isn't happening on anything not Windows 10 based.
For that reason I'm looking at my options.
I have 2 USB tuners...

August DVB-T210 (I bought this first, it wasn't very reliable on Windows)
Hauppauge WinTV-dual HD (This one was its more reliable replacement)

For the backend I have a few options...

1, I have a Raspberry Pi 3 lying around doing nothing.
2, The Intel NUC 2820 I was using as a client & backend is also doing nothing. It currently has windows 10 on, but I could ditch that in favour of something else.
3, The Vero4K supports some tuners via its OSMC operating system.
4, I think the Nvidia Shield can also do this, but I'd rather not use those if possible.

Storage wise, I have a NAS I use for storing my Blu-Ray rips on, or the Intel NUC has a 2Tb laptop HDD that I was using for recording/timeshifting.
I'd prefer not to use my NAS if possible. I don't mind removing the HDD from the NUC if required. I already have a SATA-USB adaptor.

The other option I have considered is buying a VBox TV Gateway, but I can't really justify spending over £100 when I probably have everything I need here.

So what are my options?
Any help/suggestions much appreciated.

John

If the Pi3 is doing nothing you could try it with TVHeadEnd and then see if that fulfils your needs.

I use one at home coupled to an HDHomeRun and my NAS (for recording storage) and it integrates nicely into Kodi via the PVR add-on and can be used to watch both live and recorded.

As the software is free, you've nothing to lose except a little time in setting up and configuring it, but even that's not too difficult.

I'd echo Darren's suggestion, Get a HDHomeRun Connect (or it's successor). It can be managed via a web browser. I'm not sure about the "Tools" software, but the "View" app might be Windows-only, but never fear, as there are several add-ons for Kodi available that will get you where you need to be. There's also a QPKG for QNAP that bypasses SiliconDust's somewhat flakey DVR solution. Since getting mine via the original Kickstarter campaign, I wouldn't use anything else now. Highly recommended.

(2018-06-20, 09:24)DarrenHill Wrote: [ -> ]If the Pi3 is doing nothing you could try it with TVHeadEnd and then see if that fulfils your needs.

I use one at home coupled to an HDHomeRun and my NAS (for recording storage) and it integrates nicely into Kodi via the PVR add-on and can be used to watch both live and recorded.

As the software is free, you've nothing to lose except a little time in setting up and configuring it, but even that's not too difficult.

 Darren, I was going to do just this myself as I have a Digibit R1 and a NAS.

However, I decided not to for the following reasons:

1. I was worried that the non-gigabit speed of the Pi would cause problems with multiple recordings/streams - especially if some were in HD.
2. I couldn't see the point of not just installing TVHeadend directly on the NAS.

I would be really grateful to know how your setup works in practice.

Well, I took your advice and rooted out my Pi. I installed OSMC as it has a TVHeadend server option in the included app store. It seemed like a bit of an easier option for a Linux beginner.
I've temporarily set my NAS as a recording device, but I think I'll actually rig up a USB HDD for the reason elsmandino mentions above.
The only issue I'm having at the moment is that the HD channels have no EPG data (UK Freeview). I'm hoping given time it'll resolve itself as it's only been running for 30 minutes or so.
I haven't activated timeshifting yet either. That can wait for another night.
What's nice is the EPG data I do have now has colours for the genre. I could never get that to work with the MediaPortal backend.
I'll Try some recordings and see how I get on.

So far so good, thanks for the suggestion.

Really glad it is working out, MrBfJohn - I am rather tempted to try this out myself, now.

Let us know how you get on, once you have done some tinkering with your setup.

There's a TVHeadEnd server add-on for LibreElec as well - I have used that without issue although it's the stable 4.2 version rather than the beta 4.3. However in practice both work fine.

My HDHr only has two tuners, and for the most part I record in SD rather than HD but I haven't had issues with doing anything with them.

In my case my NAS box can't have the server installed on it (I have a cheap WD MyCloud Mirror), so I had to go the Pi option. But if yours can support it well enough then there's no reason not to.

Mine has full EPG (including the HD channels) via Freeview so it should be resolvable. In my case I had to manually add the mux with the HD channels on it though as my local transmitters recently had a change-around of who supplied what and on what frequency, and the TVH presets hadn't caught up yet. But that was the only glitch I had in setting up, and that was easy enough to resolve as I could get the frequencies needed from the info on the TV itself.

Thanks for that - you have certainly inspired me to use an ARM device for TVHeadend, now.

Will start a fresh thread in the TVH forum, so as to not muddy the waters here.

OK, so issues so far.
1. The EPG still has no info for HD channels. I can view them just fine so they seem to be tuned in correctly, but the EPG is empty.
2. Using my Nas I can't seem to record anything. The recording starts, immediately finishes, and records nothing. In the web UI the recording shows up in the "Removed Recordings" section with the error "File Missing"
3. I have plugged a powered USB HDD directly into the PI. I set it up on a Windows PC and made 2 folders. "Recordings", and "Timeshift"...
After much googling on how to find folders on a Pi, I think I found the recording folder in "/media/Storage/Recordings". I added that as a recording file path, but again it failed with "File Missing". Googling this seems to point towards a permissions issue, but it then goes way over my head.

1) that would most likely be an issue with the transmission source - it may for some reason not be including EPG data. You might need to use an alternative EPG source for them.

2/3) as you note, that's probably a permission error. Linux is strong on permissions, and it may be that the folder you're trying to save to wasn't created by the user that runs the TVH server, so if there's such a mismatch you have to give access to that user via the "sudo chmod" command from the command line or via your NAS GUI.

for the 3rd one, if on the command line you go to /media/Storage and then do "sudo chmod 777 Recordings" that might sort that one out. "777" basically is the setting to give read/write/execute access to the folder (and content) for anyone and everyone on your network. If you want to know more about it just google chmod for a more detailed explanation of how things work and what settings are available (and about users and groups too under Linux).

For the first item, I'll post again later as I'm currently on a trip and away from my box to see what other options may be available under TVH.

One thing that you could use to check is the TVHclient under Android if you have an Android phone or tablet available (see link below) - install that and point it at the TVH server and see if you can see EPG data there. It's an excellent app for controlling and using TVH anyway - I'd highly recommend it.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/detai...t&hl=en_GB

Thanks for the help, I'll try some of these out later. The strange thing with the HD channel EPG is that they worked just fine when I was using MediaPortal. They also worked fine years ago when I was using SageTV.
And another strange thing is that all the TV shows have correctly allocated time slots, there's just no info about what that time slot is, except maybe 1 or 2 times a day there's random bits filled in. For instance today at 16:15-17:15 the TV show "Flog It" is listed.
I think the info must be available, I just haven't set something up correctly.
Since they're all HD versions of SD channels, can I use that EPG data perhaps?
If there are any other screenshots that might help diagnose I'll happily post them up.

What EPG grabber modules do you have enabled?

Look under configuration - channel/EPG - EPG grabber modules in the same TVheadend dashboard you screen grabbed above.

There should be ones for Freeview, Freesat and Sky plus a list of others. If they're not enabled then enable all three, and depending on your server version you can also give them suitable priorities.

You just beat me to posting. I found that section a few hours back and turned on the UK Freeview module. I checked again a few minutes ago and all the gaps were filled in. I was just going to come on and let you know.
Now I just have to sort this recording permission issue. I presume the cure will also be required for timeshifting?
I'm going to get on it now and see if I can sort it.

OK, I did the below and still the recordings fail with "File Missing"
I'd post up some sort of debug log, but I'm not sure where to find it if one exists.

From how you described it yes I think it will - timeshift is basically recording and playing so if you can't record then you can't timeshift.

Chmod should sort out the permissions - chmod -R 777 * should fix things.

That recursively sets the permissions to read/write/execute for anyone with access to the device.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chmod
https://linux.die.net/man/1/chmod