Chuck Bastion wrote:
> I'd like to unplug my cable and use my Raspberry Pi 2B (with OSMC) to watch over-the-air live TV channels, and also record/PVR stuff like local sports.
>
> I don't really understand what I need in the way of hardware/software. I have a Sony KDLW60850B TV (it has a built-in tuner, but no antenna), Raspberry Pi 2 (with OSMC and tvheadend already installed via the App Store), and that's it so far.
>
> What else do I need? Do I need an antenna? I see folks saying they use HDHomeRun in this situation--what exactly does that do and why do you need it in this context?
>
> For that matter, what exactly does tvheadend do in this context? Is it just providing PVR functionality?
>
> Thanks in advance for any help!
You will need an aerial (sorry antenna, ugh horrible word) to receive anything with Tvheadend using ATSC tuners (I'm assuming you're American from the usage of antenna).
Because the RPi shares its USB with Ethernet and its ports it's going to struggle with recordings and playback from more than one tuner +especially when streaming over Ethernet this pretty much also applies to the HDHR (when used with an RPi) as that sends the streams via Ethernet too (it's a Network tuner with a driver that fools Linux into seeing it as a local tuner).+
This can vary depending on the source content and how well the tuners drivers are written. However youshould get away with recording and watching (*locally*) from one tuner provided what you're watching and recording is on the same mux and the USB isn't overloaded by something else, hard drives used for recording etc.
The best advice I can give here is start small, try it with one tuner and see how you fare.
It really is YMMV here, hopefully someone else from your side of the pond will be able to assist you more. :)
It's a shame really RPi's are awesome machines (I have 6) let down by poor design choices (Ethernet via USB is kinda useless when it comes to streaming, especially to more than one device).