[negge]

I will soon have two DVB-C tuners at my disposal and I was thinking of doing an experiment. I have a friend who uses XBMC and I was thinking of having his PVR addon use my server as backend (over the Internet). That way we could both watch cable TV "natively", even though for his part everything happens over the Internet.

My concern is how to make tvheadend use both tuners at once? I read somewhere that I'm supposed to map the corresponding services on both tuners to the same channels, then tvheadend will automatically subscribe clients to the free adapter. Does anyone know if this approach actually works?

Another idea I had was to run two instances of tvheadend, but at least according to their website it's not possibly to change the listening ports. On the other hand there are some accounts on the internet of people who successfully run two instances of it. Does anyone know if this is possible?

Before you ask "why the hell would you want to do that" the reason is my friend has DVB-T and I have DVB-C. Plus it's mostly for the lulz.

[negge]

It seems that tvheadend can indeed be started on a different port (https://tvheadend.org/boards/4/topics/8423) so at least the second approach should work. I would still like to know if someone has gotten the first approach to work flawlessly?

[adamsutton]

Don't run 2 instances, especially not with XBMC (since it won't work unless you hack things), and its hugely inefficient especially if you have multiple clients.

TVH will properly manage all the available tuners and assign subscribers as required. This can either be to a tuner already receiving the necessary mux, or a free adapter if not. Or if nothing free and priority is higher (i.e. recording v live) it will boot an existing and re-tune, etc...

The need to copy all the muxes/services in multi-tuner adapters will hopefully be gone in the next version as we're reworking things to try and make configuration easier.

Adam

[negge]

Thanks for the answer adam! I'll post back in this thread once I get that second adapter.

[nokdim]

I would think that streaming over the internet would be more of an issue than anything else, I would think you would need a 50Meg upload and your buddy have a 50Meg download.

[adamsutton]

No nothing like that much, it won't be sending the full mux. Even HD streams tend to top out at 20Mb, SD would be more like <5Mb. Of course there are questions of legality to be considered.

Adam

[Prof Yaffle]

Ah, a mere 20Mb/s upload.... let me check my DSL line ... ;-)

[negge]

I would think that streaming over the internet would be more of an issue than anything else, I would think you would need a 50Meg upload and your buddy have a 50Meg download.

We successfully used a VLC playlist for streaming yesterday. Worked like a charm. An SD channel uses about 3 Mbit/s here, HD about 8.

Edit: using the PVR backend over the internet most definitely works. HD is a bitch to stream (slight lag all the time) but all SD works without a hitch. Next up will be to make it work with dual tuners.