Raspberry Pi Foundation introduces Pi TV HAT

Mathias Neuhaus

Did you see this ...

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-tv-hat/

They're using TVHeadend - of course; and did some nice "getting started" guide...

https://www.raspberrypi.org/app/uploads/2018/10/Getting-started-with-the-Raspberry-Pi-TV-HAT.pdf

mpmc

Yes we are aware :) Waiting for mine to arrive!

Em Smith

I hadn't heard of it.

Surely its main competition is the (supported) Xbox One Tuner? It supports DVB-T/T2/C, is less than half the price, and uses USB so it can be moved to any machine in the future.

If it were dual tuner, it would be interesting, but surely most people will use more than one tuner so will need an additional usb tuner anyway?

And for that reason, I'm out ;-)

Greg Browne

It works well, is small and well thought out, IMO.

I wanted a small cheap low power consuming TV recorder and had an existing RPi2 not being used. It was easy to set up and, for me, also fulfilled another need. I wanted to get to know Tvheadend because I'm a long term user of MythTV but the support for that package seems to be waning making it more and more difficult to set up on an OS or computer change.

Apparently, the TV-HAT can also be used with a Raspberry Pi Zero, which will make a tiny TV server. Yes, it only has one tuner, but if I get on with my Pi/TV-HAT/Tvheadend combo, I will place another alongside in the attic rather than fight with yet another twin tuner that may or may not be well supported in the latest Linux Kernel.

Now if I can just overcome a problem with recording to a USB stick ......

mpmc

Greg Browne wrote:

> It works well, is small and well thought out, IMO.

I almost completely agree, although it has some flaws.

> I wanted a small cheap low power consuming TV recorder and had an existing RPi2 not being used. It was easy to set up and, for me, also fulfilled another need. I wanted to get to know Tvheadend because I'm a long term user of MythTV but the support for that package seems to be waning making it more and more difficult to set up on an OS or computer change.

MythTV worked fine when I last used it, however I found it rather bloated and it tried to do too many things. IIRC it had both a full screen GUI and a separate backend, the GUI required almost a full desktop-like environment, and it was the only way new users could configure the backend. I really hope it's improved since then!

>
> Apparently, the TV-HAT can also be used with a Raspberry Pi Zero, which will make a tiny TV server. Yes, it only has one tuner, but if I get on with my Pi/TV-HAT/Tvheadend combo, I will place another alongside in the attic rather than fight with yet another twin tuner that may or may not be well supported in the latest Linux Kernel.
>

> Now if I can just overcome a problem with recording to a USB stick ......

Don't expect it to be fantastic on a zero, the WiFi might be a bottleneck. I came across a weird issue when using it on my RPI3B. If you have both wifi and the HAT in use full mux streaming glitches like hell over Ethernet, yes Ethernet, it's not possible on WiFi - at least not for me. But if you disable WiFi completely (blacklist the module) it's perfect.

Greg Browne

Thanks. That explains one or two issues that I had with the RPi 3B+ TV-HAT combo, but when I realised that it would work with my spare RPi2, I released the 3B for better uses.

So far I think this is an excellent combination, with some limitations that you would expect from such cheap, small, low powered devices. I think the Raspberry Pi foundation is on to a winner with this, but, of course, it is not for everyone.

Saen Acro

Jaguarboard is still way better
For 22€ at less DVB-C/C2 must be included

Greg Browne

> Mark Clarkstone wrote: Don't expect it to be fantastic on a zero, the WiFi might be a bottleneck. I came across a weird issue when using it on my RPI3B. If you have both wifi and the HAT in use full mux streaming glitches like hell over Ethernet, yes Ethernet, it's not possible on WiFi - at least not for me. But if you disable WiFi completely (blacklist the module) it's perfect.

Thanks Mark, I took your advice and used only ethernet (over our mains wiring). The TV-HAT is working fine on my RPi2, with TVHeadend, which I’m slowly learning to use. I did hit an odd issue trying to get it to record to a USB stick; tried all sorts of fixes, reformatting to FAT32, then Ext4, changing the permissions to all, but TVHeadend would not record to it, showing space left on it as 0/0/0.

One website suggested editing FSTAB to mount the stick automatically by using the very long UUID. This didn’t work. TVHeadend still wouldn’t write to the stick although I could read and write to it from within the Pi.

There is so much differing advice on how to do this, but I did find a simple edit of /etc/fstab that worked. (sorry cannot remember the website)

Prompted by Em Smith’s post above, I set up an Rpi 3 B+ with an old USB tuner from augustint. TVHeadend sees it as a Realtek RTL2832. Following ‘Linux Crumbs’ (http://gedakc.users.sourceforge.net/display-doc.php?name=pvr-rpi-tvheadend#crfohd ) comprehensive Dec 2017 article
“Build a Cheap PVR using Raspberry Pi 3, LibreELEC, Kodi, Tvheadend, & HDHomeRun”__

After a few minor hiccups, I now have a Pi TV server/player using LibreELEC that has performed well over the last couple of days. I’m impressed.

I’m close to achieving my aim of building a small, cheap, low power consuming, flexible and easy to use TV recorder/player and, in the process, am beginning to admire the writers of TVHeadend.

http://digitalanswers.info/images/2018/18o-tvhat.jpg

Walter av

Nice to see that Raspbian has included tvheadend package in their own repository.