Quick followup. I put a powered USB hub between the RPi and the tuner, problem seems to have gone away. Now I'm just seeing a little stuttering when trying to watch via a remote client (NVidia Shield, via 100g switch connection to RPi).
How can I figure out where the bottleneck is? I'm not sure how old the USB hub is (definitely not USB3, maybe not even be USB2: usb-devices shows it as a USB2 hub ), or is this because of shared bandwidth of USB with ethernet on RPi? Am I just asking too much of my little RPi?
If the answer to the last question is yes, I'm open to suggestions. I would like to reuse the WinTV-dualHD tuner but am open to any other device to setup as a dedicated TVheadend server only (or is there something better than TVheadend?)