Posts by DeltaMikeCharlie

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback.

At the start of this process, I did have a vague recollection of a Kodi addon to manage TVH. I remember having installed it once, but for reasons that I can not remember, I uninstalled it and went on with my life.

I tried to install tvh2kodi again yesterday, but it crashed because of a deprecated Kodi function. It seems that it has been updated for Matrix, but not Nexus. tvh2kodi claims to have a setup wizard, so if that can be made to work then I need not continue with my idea.

I took a quick look into the tvh2kodi bugs and I fixed several problems. However, every problem I fixed just uncovered a new one until it lead to a problem with an external dependency so I stopped there. I think that tvh2kodi needs some remediation to get it working again.

Unless the ‘PVR Setup Wizard’ is either part of, or run from, the LE ‘First Run Wizard’, then its value to end users is reduced. If the user needs to finish the LE wizard and then load a Kodi addon manually, they may as well just load the PVR back/front-ends of their choice manually and get on with their day. I have no interest in creating an LE fork just for that.

I need to reconsider my approach. If tvh2kodi can be revived, then that is my referred option as it already has the functionality that I proposed for the TVH part. Perhaps it can be modified to detect that it is running on an LE system and adapt accordingly, or, perhaps if there ever is an LE ‘PVR Wizard’ then it can call the tvh2kodi wizard with a parameter.

I’ve been working on the concept of a PVR Setup Wizard to aid users in configuring a basic PVR using LibreELEC. The idea is that the users will be able to setup a simple PVR from scratch with little effort.

Bits and pieces of this already exist, however, I’d like to try to consolidate these pieces so that a new user can setup a ‘default PVR’ quickly and easily with LibreELEC out-of-the-box via the Kodi interface.

I have already built a prototype Python script to do this for Tvheadend. I’d like to hear some options regard the merits of this idea and whether it is worth pursuing for other backends.

Part One

Expand the existing LibreELEC setup wizard to ask the user if they want to install a PVR. If the user answers positively, they would continue into the PVR Setup wizard.

From what I have found, LE seems to have 3 PVR servers that can be run as Kodi addons (NextPVR, Tvheadend and VDR), there may be more, these are just what I have found so far. Furthermore, it seems that only Tvheadend in installed in the LE image. The others needs to be installed from the LE repository.

I think that the user question would be something like “Which PVR would you like to install?” providing a list of available PVR servers with “None” being the first and default option. Based on this selection, the appropriate Kodi PVR server and client addons will be installed by the existing TVH setup wizard script.

Part Two

Each of the LE PVR server addons will be updated with their own setup wizard that will run when first loaded. I have already mostly completed this step for Tvheadend.

In my TVH wizard, I perform the following steps:

• Set the TVH GUI language to be the same as the Kodi GUI language, defaulting to ‘eng_GB’ if there is no suitable equivalent.
• Set the TVH server name to be the same as the LE hostname.
• Fetch the tuner adapters that TVH has auto-detected and work out which transport (DVB-T, DVB-C, etc) they support.
• Give the user the choice of ONE of these transports.
• Based on the selected transport, list the Country and then Region for the pre-defined muxes.
• Create a new ‘Network’ connected to the adapters of the selected transport and link in the selected pre-defined muxes for the transport/country/region.
• Perform a scan for services. This is not always successful the first time, so that runs in a loop until all services have an LCN or a timeout is reached.
• Create a channel for every service.
• Perform an initial EPG scan.

I’m thinking of adding an easy way to configure the EPG scan interval too.

This was very specific to TVH. I suspect that other PVRs will follow a similar logic, but that all of the details will be customised to each PVR’s architecture.

Running the script on a remote system, I was able to get a virgin LE system (with TVH server and client manually installed for testing purposes), to the stage where the EPG grid in Kodi could be seen populating in real-time as the first EPG scans occurred.

Thoughts, opinions and comments welcome.