Looking to Merge Live TV with my IPTV list.

    I have an existing IPTV list that I am happy with. I am already using IPTV Merge to merge that list.

    Now I want to buy a Tuner whether a USB or a cheap used HD HomeRun. I see that older HD Homerun units may require additional software like this ( https://github.com/goyney/hdhr-assistant ) as it its for a NAS , but is PHP and will probably run on my raspberry Pi server.

    I was also looking at these as they are plenty cheap but not sure if there are drivers in Libreelec or not for either of them.

    USB 2.0 Digital TV Stick PC HDTV DVB-T Antenna Receiver Video Tuner Dongle | eBay
    High definition TV(HDTV): 480i/480p/720p/1080i. Support HDTV resolution up to 1920 1200 and 16:9/16:10/4:3 widescreen. Digital terrestrial video and radio…
    www.ebay.com
    Mygica USB 2.0 TV Tuner with Antenna, ATSC/QAM TV Tuner Stick for PC Laptop W... | eBay
    Mygica USB 2.0 TV Tuner with Antenna, ATSC/QAM TV Tuner Stick for PC Laptop Windows Android TV, A681B. Watch live free over the air TV, watch and record…
    www.ebay.com

    Maybe there is something else I can look at instead? Any suggestions?

    Thanks

    Mark

    Ok with little or no info I have advanced to the next step , taking a leap of faith here. I purchased a legacy HD Homerun cheap on ebay. It can do 2 simultaneous streams but only up to 1080i apparently.

    When I started looking at threads of people wanting to do what I am doing + recording people started talking about Next PVR but NextPVR seems dependent on a Paid guide service from what I can tell. With IPTV Merge and Zap2EPG I have guide data all covered.

    So Monday I will have the HD Homerun and would like to get things in order so installed NextPVR on a Raspberry Pi2 but do not know how to integrate the existing guide data to that as it seems to want to get it from a paid service. Or I can go the IPTV Simple method which seems 90% working already. I tried to install a fork of IPTV recorder today (for kodi 19) and that seems to have failed, or my settings are somehow wrong.

    Of course I would rather not occupy the Raspberry Pi for this use as it is already my asterisk server and might get bogged down. I suppose there is probably a version I can put on a Mini Windows 10 system.

    Any info , anyone?

    You'll probably find the easiest way to do this is to use TV Headend - adding your IPTV and ATSC HDHomeRun sources to the same TV Headend back-end, which will then present them as a single PVR source to Kodi.

    It's quite an involved set-up process - but worth persevering with. TV Headend runs under Linux - and runs fine on a Pi or an x86 box, and is pretty lightweight in CPU terms, as it's just moving around <15Mbs streams without doing any video encoding or decoding.

    Yea i just took a look at that . It looks like I need to learn a foreign language to understand it.

    I tried to get through the install and initial configuration and have no idea about what half of the stuff was about. I do know intimately the network and Video parts but this is way out there even seeming to use inconsistent terms for what may be the same thing.

    examples (just some of many)

    Back-door username ??? Is that the username and password set at install? They never called it back-door at install. IN the config it asks me to set admin username that does not conflict with "back door" username.

    No idea where or how to add the Playlist and guide xml data.

    It seems to say you can not go back to the wizard one you install so I think it seems like unless you know what to configure from the start you are sunk.

    It was easier to "apt-get remove --purge" than try to figure out what even half of this stuff meant.

    Even what I found for documentation that is supposed to be relevant here Automatic IPTV Network - Tvheadend seems vague and ambiguous. It does not tell me how to get there nor where things are at! For a newcomer that is important and probably inhibits a lot of new users from adopting it.

    If no good docs then is crap.

    I've been using TV Headend for 10+ years - including building it from source. Never needed the superuser/backdoor option. Where in the web config is it asking you to set-up or use a backdoor username and password?

    I don't use the Wizard, other than to set the initial language. I set-up my real TV adaptor, networks and muxes myself, and import IPTV streams similarly. I don't use XMLTV (the IPTV and DVB stream I use have embedded 'in band' EPG data) but there are a lot of options for using it.

    There is a learning curve - but it's worth it.

    In the initial config.

    Install goes like this

    while installing .deb am asked for a username and password (is this what is later referred to as "Back door password"?

    Opening the web interface first time one of the many ambiguous settings (or ambiguous statements) is to set an admin password that does not conflict with the "Back door" username. But no clue what or where the "backdoor password" is or where it is set. I think it suffers from a case of name conformity. That is where an object is called something one time and something else the next time. So typical of so many open source projects.

    apt-get remove --purge is my best option I believe . GONE!

    Not looking for months long frustration Ill stick to IPTVSimple as I am almost there already.

    Mark

    What you want to do I do with the tvheadend service within LibreELEC. I have tried others like Jellyfin, NextPVR and Emby but none satisfies me as much as tvheadend for managing and organizing TV channels and EPG guides. The docker linuxserver/tvheadend version also allows easy installation and integration into LibreELEC of other video processors such as vlc and streamlink in addition to the default ffmpeg processor for piped streaming of problematic IPTV sources.

    When you get to know tvheadend you'll see that it's great: it supports hardware tuners (it's not a recommended option because driver support has been less and less for a long time) and SAT>IP tuners. Other external tuners: HDHomeRun, VBox TV Gateway, and other Enigma2 tuners, can be easily integrated into the tvheadend service in the form of an IPTV m3u list.

    My tvheadend service handles all kinds of TV sources, USB tuners, local and remote SAT>IP tuners, coming from another remote tvheadend server and all kinds of IPTV m3u lists from local servers, and from the internet, as well as seventeen different EPG sources.

    In short, I recommend that you spend a little of your time studying tvheadend.

    Quote from tekno

    I was also looking at these as they are plenty cheap but not sure if there are drivers in Libreelec or not for either of them.

    a good page what's support by linux/LE is this:

    Hardware device information - LinuxTVWiki

    the page is partly NOT up to date, so check the INet too *before* buying.

    and also check *before* buying if and how to send the device back/get your money back in case it doesn't play

    I'll ask one other question

    Where are the docs for configuring IPTV sources?

    I do not believe they exist in an intelligible form. What I found does not say how to get to them, as If I should already know where it is all located. I posted that link earlier.

    From the description; the .deb package install requires sudo (root/admin) rights to be installed. It's not a backdoor password, but since it can be used to gain root rights on the host it's a credential to protect - hence the security best-practice advice of not using the same password for the admin user in TVH.

    so you support my statement on WTF is the backdoor password. Its a clusterfrack that seriously needs updated docs and thos docs need to conform to what is in the installer and web UI

    Quote from chewitt

    From the description; the .deb package install requires sudo (root/admin) rights to be installed. It's not a backdoor password, but since it can be used to gain root rights on the host it's a credential to protect - hence the security best-practice advice of not using the same password for the admin user in TVH.

    Yes - definitely.

    When you install tvheadend from a deb or a repo (which adds it to your system services so that it runs on boot etc.), rather than just running it as code from the command line, you can't run it with the 'no access control' flag (which lets you in without a login and password). As a result TV Headend, when installed from a repo or deb, requires you to create an initial admin user, so that after installation you can actually log in to the web interface for user setup, tuner config etc. and to add other users. I believe this may be the 'superuser' you are talking about.

    This admin account definitely shouldn't be the same as your login and password for Linux.

    Once you are in the web interface you can create individual user accounts with their own logins and passwords (and different rights levels, including admins), including additional accounts with admin rights, and you can create an anonymous user with very basic streaming rights (and no web interface rights) that won't require a login and password ( as it gets boring typing in logins and passwords into VLC when you just want to open a stream)

    Separately AIUI there is a superuser file you can create that will let you create a new admin user if you get locked out from TV Headend's web interface (because you've forgotten, or deleted, all the accounts with web interface access for instance). I believe this is referred to as 'the backdoor'. This is stored in :

    Code
    /home/hts/.hts/tvheadend/superuser

    It's only for use if you get locked out AIUI. I've never had to use it. It only works with the English language UI I think.

    You can also reset the password, if you installed via deb, by reconfiguring using dpkg-reconfigure I think.

    Quote from tekno

    so you support my statement on WTF is the backdoor password. Its a clusterfrack that seriously needs updated docs and thos docs need to conform to what is in the installer and web UI

    AIUI development on tvheadend has slowed down quite a lot over the years, as there has been less and less functionality to add, and a lot of the earlier key developers have had less time to devote to the project as their lives have moved on. Installation via a deb package is just one way of installing TV Headend, and is specific to Debian/Ubuntu flavours of Linux. There are numerous other ways of installing and using TV Headend (Docker containers, building from GitHub and running from the command line etc.)

    It's an open source project, like Kodi, developed by volunteers largely in their spare time. Like a lot of projects, time has been spent more on developing the software than writing up the documents. A lot of TV Headend is pretty self-explanatory if you understand basic DVB and IPTV - and the forums usually contain a lot of answers to questions that have come up.

    I like it, I use it daily, it solves problems for me. There are other solutions such as MythTV, VDR, NextPVR, TVMosaic etc. I don't find them as useful or as easy to use (VDR had no decent support for UK DVB-T2 Huffman EPG compression for instance)

    If you don't like TV Headend then nobody is forcing you to use it! If you think the documentation needs to be improved, nothing is stopping you improving it yourself.

    You asked for a solution that would allow you to create a PVR back-end with both ATSC 8VSB and IPTV streams. TV Headend is what a lot of us would use to do that. If it's not for you, it's not for you.

    Edited 4 times, last by noggin: Merged a post created by noggin into this post. (May 2, 2022 at 8:49 AM).

    I have read above something about .deb installers that I don't quite understand, LibreELEC does not support this and installation on Linux machines can create headaches, for this reason and others I suggest the installation of tvheadend docker service.

    For those who want to install the tvheadend service in a minute and ready to go, on almost any platform, including LibreELEC, I suggest this installation SSH command:

    docker run -d \

    --name=9981-tvheadend \

    --net=host \

    -e PUID=0 \

    -e PGID=0 \

    -e TZ=Europe/Paris \

    -e RUN_OPTS="--satip_xml http://<satip1>:<port>/desc.xml --satip_xml http://<satip2>:<port>/desc.xml --satip_xml http://<satip3 >:<port>/desc.xml" \

    -p 9981:9981 \

    -p 9982:9982 \

    -v /storage/.config/dockers/tvheadend/config:/config \

    -v /storage:/storage \

    -v /media:/media \

    --privileged \

    --restart unless-stopped \

    linuxserver/tvheadend

    Previous requirements:

    • SSH access
    • Docker service already installed

    Characteristic:

    • Execution 'root'
    • Full access to /storage and /media in LibreELEC
    • Configuration directory located at /storage/.config/dockers/tvheadend/config
    • Directory for automatic running scripts on tvheadend service startup located at /storage/.config/dockers/tvheadend/config/custom-cont-init.d

    Yep - if you're installing in LibreElec you install the TV Headend service, and as you have said, installing debs manually has some limitations.

    I used to always build from scratch, and still do on x86 platforms. I've hit occasional issues building natively on Pi 4Bs, so usually install from the repo using ' sudo apt install tvheadend ' but that's probably quite an old build that's being installed (though it does come with a lot more EPG stuff than the standard GitHub builds). It does what I need though - so it's largely in the 'it just works' category.

    I mainly use my TV Headends with SAT>IP and HD Home Run IP tuners, though have used Win TV Dual HD tuners in the past (ISTR that you can improve their performance by changing their USB transfer type)

    My comments above relating to deb installers were on a Raspberry Pi as a TVHeadend Server. not on the Libreelec client.

    I gave up on TV Headend , way too many problems.

    Even if I had resolved half of them, it was still full of quirks, unstable, flaky recording, poor documentation, etc.

    I installed NextPVR quicker and easier than I expected. It seemed more logical than my first attempt for some reason. I kept looking to see if there was more to configure but then installed the client in Libreelec and boom , it just works!

    Only problem is getting guide data in NextPVR as apparently it will not use Over the Air listings for what reason I fail to understand. I do believe that is where the listings came from in TVheadend.

    Are you running NextPVR in Docker or via CvH's addon from the NextPVR forum? The addon works great IMO.

    Since you mentioned zap2epg, I assume you are in US or Canada. NextPVR doesn't support ATSC OTA EPG on Linux and even if it did it the data is awful many times 8-12 hours of data or even no data at all. In addition to the SD-JSON (which is actually worth paying a cup of coffee a month if you are serious about PVR) you can always use XMLTV from zap2epg. If you have any questions post on the NextPVR forum.

    Martin

    Yep - AIUI OTA PSIP-delivered EPG data in the US is pretty flaky so XMLTV is the way to go usually.

    (In Europe 'in band' EPG data delivered OTA, by cable or by satellite is usually pretty good)

    I just set up NextPVR for a simple test on a RPi3 with the LE service addon with two HDHR tuners and was able to play one channel in Kodi and stream 3 other 1080i channels to other clients. I think caching to the the SD card would be my big bottleneck here two.

    From top

    2491 root 20 0 752420 103188 33204 S 222.4 10.9 21:05.28 dotnet

    1929 root 20 0 641076 93252 20084 D 51.0 9.9 39:23.09 kodi.bin

    LE doesn't have htop but the 224% CPU seems about right for these slower SoC's. Recording 3 streams and watching one is much less CPU intensive which is probably a better use case. TVHeadend on the RPi3 might be a little lighter, though if this troubles you but I'd probably go with a bigger box myself for this kind of use.

    Martin