Hi Mike,
I may have more experience with compiling (I'm not only a Gentoo user, but also cross compiled software for a linux-based mediaplayer), but compiling TVHeadend is one of the easiest, so I would suggest you to give it a try if you can't find a recent packaged version for ubuntu.
This is the starting point:
https://tvheadend.org/projects/tvheadend/wiki/Building
But actually I believe you should be able to use most of the Gentoo guideline as well:
https://tvheadend.org/projects/tvheadend/wiki/Tvheadend_gentoo
Just keep the .deb installed, make sure you have installed these: build-essential git pkg-config libssl-dev bzip2 wget libavahi-client-dev zlib1g-dev
Then:
mkdir -p /tmp/tvheadend/src
git clone
https://github.com/andoma/tvheadend.git /tmp/tvheadend/src/
cd /tmp/tvheadend/src/
./configure --prefix=/tmp/tvheadend
make
make install
you can not run the executable; /tmp/tvheadend/bin/tvheadend
(the gentoo init script starts with -C -f)
If you want to uninstall, you only have to remove the /tmp/tvheadend directory.
If you run into issues, just let me know (send me an e-mail, might be better than a huge thread here).