Haha, your personal choice would definitely be a massive overkill for our purposes & budget.
(sorry for a long message)
In short, I am currently working in East Africa, where our company is working on providing local TV in a simply accessible manner for local inhabitants in rural areas.
So, I am looking now for people coming from US, who can bring some components, which i ll order from Amazon(quick shipment). Once here, i ll move the tvheadend backend + usb tuner to the new intel-based pc. All of that will be installed in a rural African area. The goal is to successfully decode channels(tvheadend is taking care of that), and then make the stream work from locally accessible web server. People would use some of their tablets and cheap Android phones to login into a portal and watch local TV. (That's an ultimate goal)
Currently, all of that is implemented on Raspberry Pi and is working "fine" if i m using laptop(Win/Mac+chrome) to stream the videos from browser. But it does not work if i use any android device.
From what I have understood so far, tvheadend version for Pi can only output 'matroska'-type stream, which is raw TS stream. Win/Mac Chrome can handle that, but not an Android devices. I have tried transcoding(on-the-go) one of the TS raw stream using RPi app(rtranscode) and transoded stream was working fine both on Win/Mac and android devices. Unfortunately, RPi written transoder(rtranscode) can only deal with 1-2 streams at the time. And i have like 6-7 channels which needs to be transcoded.
What i have learned by googling, full version of tvheadend(not for RPi) has multiple various streaming profiles. So i think, that upgrading hardware will allow me to install and use full version of tvheadend and use different streaming profiles, like "webtv-vp8-vorbis-webm" and i hope that would work find both on android and win/mac devices.
Do you think I am going to the right direction?
Speaking of hardware, I am aiming at reusing our USB tv tuner(based on Realtek RTL2832U):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-DVB-T-RTL-SDR-Realtek-RTL2832U-R820T-DVB-T-Tuner-Receiver-MCX-Input-BP-/112263012776
Some intel based PC (using some linux distribution) which is within 150-200$ budget (still am looking for a device).
Thank you, saen acro, for continues help! (what you do it a great help and impact into African community)