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Knight Rider · 2015-04-06, 20:54

I live in a rural area and my OTA antenna only picks up about 3 English channels. At work, we have an 80 ft tower which I installed a TV antenna on a few years back. This antenna gets about 15 channels including some major US networks. I would like to find a way to get access to the TV signal at work, on my TV home. Is there any way using Kodi or an alternative solution that I could achieve this. I would prefer to avoid the Slingbox type solution where the content is really only available through a mobile phone. I would prefer that it go straight to a media player accessible by my TV.

noggin · 2015-04-06, 21:52

TV Headend allows transcoding on-the-fly and has some ATSC compatibility - maybe that would be worth pursuing? You would probably need an x86 box to do the transcoding at your work, I don't think ARM boxes have the CPU power (and I don't think hardware encoding has been implemented)

ozkhan1 · 2015-04-06, 22:13

(2015-04-06, 20:54)Knight Rider Wrote: I live in a rural area and my OTA antenna only picks up about 3 English channels. At work, we have an 80 ft tower which I installed a TV antenna on a few years back. This antenna gets about 15 channels including some major US networks. I would like to find a way to get access to the TV signal at work, on my TV home. Is there any way using Kodi or an alternative solution that I could achieve this. I would prefer to avoid the Slingbox type solution where the content is really only available through a mobile phone. I would prefer that it go straight to a media player accessible by my TV.

Kodi can act as a front end for Slingbox from what I understand, so slingbox can actually be a way for you to go.

http://kodi.wiki/view/Slingbox

Knight Rider · 2015-04-06, 22:22

(2015-04-06, 22:13)ozkhan1 Wrote:
(2015-04-06, 20:54)Knight Rider Wrote: I live in a rural area and my OTA antenna only picks up about 3 English channels. At work, we have an 80 ft tower which I installed a TV antenna on a few years back. This antenna gets about 15 channels including some major US networks. I would like to find a way to get access to the TV signal at work, on my TV home. Is there any way using Kodi or an alternative solution that I could achieve this. I would prefer to avoid the Slingbox type solution where the content is really only available through a mobile phone. I would prefer that it go straight to a media player accessible by my TV.

Kodi can act as a front end for Slingbox from what I understand, so slingbox can actually be a way for you to go.

http://kodi.wiki/view/Slingbox

Interesting idea, thanks.

One other idea I saw was to put a HD Homerun Plus at work and a Kodi/XBMC box at home with the HDHomeRun Live TV app. If I connected them by VPN, then it might work. Not sure which option would work better though.

ozkhan1 · 2015-04-06, 22:31

(2015-04-06, 22:22)Knight Rider Wrote:
(2015-04-06, 22:13)ozkhan1 Wrote:
(2015-04-06, 20:54)Knight Rider Wrote: I live in a rural area and my OTA antenna only picks up about 3 English channels. At work, we have an 80 ft tower which I installed a TV antenna on a few years back. This antenna gets about 15 channels including some major US networks. I would like to find a way to get access to the TV signal at work, on my TV home. Is there any way using Kodi or an alternative solution that I could achieve this. I would prefer to avoid the Slingbox type solution where the content is really only available through a mobile phone. I would prefer that it go straight to a media player accessible by my TV.

Kodi can act as a front end for Slingbox from what I understand, so slingbox can actually be a way for you to go.

http://kodi.wiki/view/Slingbox

Interesting idea, thanks.

One other idea I saw was to put a HD Homerun Plus at work and a Kodi/XBMC box at home with the HDHomeRun Live TV app. If I connected them by VPN, then it might work. Not sure which option would work better though.

I think that would work as well as the Slingbox. But the app has better quality streams and may require higher bandwidth in my opinion. So you need to have a very good upload speed. I could be wrong though. The only advantage of Slingbox I see over this is that it is actually designed for place shifting. Its not for eveyrone and is limited in what it can do but nonetheless has found a lot of followers in the market.
An older version of slingbox used to come with ATSC tv tuner, so you did not have to get a separate device for OTA. Not sure if the more recent new gen Slingboxes have them though.

ozkhan1 · 2015-04-06, 22:33

http://www.amazon.com/Sling-Media-Slingb...B000HBEKJE

Knight Rider · 2015-04-06, 22:46

(2015-04-06, 22:31)ozkhan1 Wrote:
(2015-04-06, 22:22)Knight Rider Wrote:
(2015-04-06, 22:13)ozkhan1 Wrote: Kodi can act as a front end for Slingbox from what I understand, so slingbox can actually be a way for you to go.

http://kodi.wiki/view/Slingbox

Interesting idea, thanks.

One other idea I saw was to put a HD Homerun Plus at work and a Kodi/XBMC box at home with the HDHomeRun Live TV app. If I connected them by VPN, then it might work. Not sure which option would work better though.

I think that would work as well as the Slingbox. But the app has better quality streams and may require higher bandwidth in my opinion. So you need to have a very good upload speed. I could be wrong though. The only advantage of Slingbox I see over this is that it is actually designed for place shifting. Its not for eveyrone and is limited in what it can do but nonetheless has found a lot of followers in the market.
An older version of slingbox used to come with ATSC tv tuner, so you did not have to get a separate device for OTA. Not sure if the more recent new gen Slingboxes have them though.

I've got 5Mbps upload at work and 7Mbps download at home.

ozkhan1 · 2015-04-06, 22:55

You could be fine with HD Homerun and a good VPN connection then.

Here is another interesting thread at AVS that might give you some insight. Apparently there are others in a similar situation as yours.

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/26-home-th...ngbox.html

noggin · 2015-04-07, 00:03

Does the HD Homerun re-encode ? I thought it was a tuner that delivered the broadcast stream unmolested? If that's the case then 5Mbs is not going to be a high enough bitrate for US ATSC MPEG2 HD streams is it? Would be OK for Slingbox though.

Having said that the HD Homerun Extend appears to re-encode MPEG2 to H264 for tablets and phones - so it might work - though I don't know what the API situation is within Kodi for the H264 re-encodes.

ozkhan1 · 2015-04-07, 04:46

(2015-04-07, 00:03)noggin Wrote: Does the HD Homerun re-encode ? I thought it was a tuner that delivered the broadcast stream unmolested? If that's the case then 5Mbs is not going to be a high enough bitrate for US ATSC MPEG2 HD streams is it? Would be OK for Slingbox though.

Having said that the HD Homerun Extend appears to re-encode MPEG2 to H264 for tablets and phones - so it might work - though I don't know what the API situation is within Kodi for the H264 re-encodes.

noggin, everytime we talk about the hd home run app, barring the one for kodi, the others encode the stream to be played over wifi on lighter hardware such as tablets so i think 5 megs should be enough. then again i dont know it performs over vpn. primarily its designed to work over lan not wan.

it will be an interesting experiment though. i personally think though that a more standard place shifting solution would be best for him though. les hassles and works out of the box.