First IPTV setup hardware and software

Jacket Tayta

Hi guys

I've been out of the sat scene for a long time. Now life has calmed down a bit and the kids are a little older, I wanted to get up to speed on creating my own IPTV service for personal use around the home/on tablets.

I've been using my VU solo and VU Zero hardware (and the VU+ app) to stream channels to the ipads/mobile devices/android tv boxes to fill this gap but wanted something a little more robust going forward.

Can anyone suggest what hardware and software I need to set up tvheadend from scratch.

I have only sat hardware, no tuner cards for the PC or anything, so a very high level "you need this, this and this to start with and come back when your there" would be much appreciated. Wanted to get something set up this year thats a bit more '2016'.

Tayta

Jacket Tayta

Nobody?

cab guy

Jacket Tayta wrote:
> Hi guys
>
> I've been out of the sat scene for a long time. Now life has calmed down a bit and the kids are a little older, I wanted to get up to speed on creating my own IPTV service for personal use around the home/on tablets.
>
> I've been using my VU solo and VU Zero hardware (and the VU+ app) to stream channels to the ipads/mobile devices/android tv boxes to fill this gap but wanted something a little more robust going forward.
>
> Can anyone suggest what hardware and software I need to set up tvheadend from scratch.
>
> I have only sat hardware, no tuner cards for the PC or anything, so a very high level "you need this, this and this to start with and come back when your there" would be much appreciated. Wanted to get something set up this year thats a bit more '2016'.
>

> Tayta

Hi mate,

If it was me I would look at an old PC to install Ubuntu linux on, then TVHeadend on top of that. It doesn't need to be very powerful at all, as people have even used Raspberry Pis, but I wouldn't know if you can get DVB-S USB tuners.

I would put the most recommended Sat tuner card from the "recommended hardware" thread in this forum, which people have commented on being the most stable.

I'm a DVB-T only guy (sat dish can't see Astra from my new house) but thought I'd at least post something to get the conversation going!

cheers

Jacket Tayta

Much appreciated cab guy.

I've got a desktop knocking about, i'll dig her out and get Ubuntu installed. Thanks for the heads up i'll take a look over at the recommended hardware thread and look for a sat tuner card for it. :)

Jonathan Thomson

If you've got any specific questions give me a shout. We moved into a new (to us) house last year and I set about making it tech/media friendly by cabling the place and routing everything to my "comms room" in the garage. Part of this install is a dedicated PC (specs below) which is patched into the network and also has a couple of HDMI->CAT6 sets attached which pipes the signal from Kodi to the TV's in the house. I'm also just in the process of experimenting with a Raspberry Pi (although I think they're a little underpowered for my liking) but a 30 quid extender to my media box is really not to be sniffed at.

Media PC Specs: "SilverStone SST-SG11B; Sugo SFF Micro ATX, black" "ASRock B150M Pro4S S1151 mATX Intel Motherboard" (running custom BIOS that the manufacturer made for my mix of DVB cards)
"Intel Pentium i3 Dual-Core i3-6300 3.8 GHz Processor CPU" "HyperX FURY 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) 2133 MHz DDR4 CL14 UDIMM Memory Kit (Skylake Compatible) - Black" "EVGA 600 W 80+ PC Power Supply Unit - White" 64GB SSD that I had lying around
An old WMC remote transceiver I had lying around
1 x "TBS PCI-E DVB-S2 Quad Tuner TV Card High Definition Digital Satellite Tuner PCI Express Card HD (DVB-S2/DVB-S) Receiver - TBS6984" providing 4 DVB-S/S2 feeds from Astra 2 (Sky UK)

1 x "TBS PCI-E DVB-T2 Quad TV Tuner Card High Definition Digital Free to Air Tuner (DVB-T/DVB-T2) Receiver - TBS6284" providing 4 DVB-T/T2 feeds from Freeview

Channels from DVB-S and DVB-T are merged down and DVB-T given priority, that means that TVHeadend will select BBC One from a DVB-T card over a DVB-S card and allow the DVB-S cards to focus on satellite-only channels (which often require decryption)

Picture/sound is transmitted via the onboard Intel Skylake GPU via HDMI using two "Neet® HDBaseT Extender 4Kx2K Ultra HD Over Single Cat5e/Cat6 /Cat7 with bidirectional IR Control - up to 70m - N75" receivers with the signal split between two TV's using an "ESYNiC 2 Way HDMI Splitter Amplifier Switch-1 input 2 output Switcher Support 3D Full HD 1080P HDTV"

The two TV's receive the same picture and are controlled by remote controls from various sources which I've programmed to work with Kodi (Sky HD and Humax FreeSat are perfect for this job)

Software wise, it's running; Ubuntu 16.04 desktop (with Turbo VNC Server, "x2go" and "Synergy" providing remote control/access duties)
"Kodi 16.1 'Jarvis'" "TVHeadend compiled from GIT Master" "LIRC providing remote control duties" "OSCam" compiled from SVN
"Opensource TBS drivers" compiled from GIT

"picons-source" (provides gorgeous, frequently updated channel icons to TVHeadend/Kodi)

Storage is centralised; my entire media collection (movies, TV series and music) are stored on a 24TB Synology NAS configured in Synology Hybrid RAID giving me two disks of redundancy. TVHeadend records directly to the NAS (the shares are mounted as NFS using the excellent autofs package from the Ubuntu repositories) as is all my media. I've just started using Kodi in conjunction with "MySQL" to centralise my content collection - that means when I do add new Raspberry Pi based clients, they'll be accessing the same library as the main PC, including play status, ratings etc.

OSCam provides decryption duties for the premium channels.

Considering it's a cobbling together of various free packages it works almost flawlessly and it's been in "production" for about eight weeks now so has achieved WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor :D )

So you might say I've got a bit of experience in the subject so as per my opening offer, just shout up with any specific questions.
<<

Jacket Tayta

Awesome dude! On a slightly lesser scale this is what I'm after. The ability to throw either sat or stored media around the house to the bedrooms and lounge tvs and tablets . I'll get my desktop set up. It's got a decent amount of ram as it was used to stand up 6 vm's. I'll no doubt have some questions as I go. Much appreciated!

Jonathan Thomson

If you can live with a slightly laggy user interface then Kodi (OpenElec, LibreElec or OSMC) on a Raspberry Pi will be awesome.

Don't splash out on a USB remote receiver, I just bought a strip of ribbon cable and an IR module for about 3 quid off eBay and it plugs straight into the GPIO pins on the RPi - with one line of configuration added to the Config.txt on the SD card it's basically plug and play (see attached photo).

I'm using an RPi B+ so things may be much better on the later models - the RPi 3 is meant to be many times faster than the B+ so if you get an RPi 3 for each room you want TV in, the IR modules and so on you're probably looking at 50 quid per room you want to connect - seems pretty decent to me.

Jacket Tayta

What physical remote do you use with these? Some universal ones?

Jonathan Thomson

A mixture really, if there are buttons on the TV remote that don't operate functions on the TV then I use LIRC to program those buttons.

"Sky HD remotes" are pretty good as they have buttons for PVR controls - I have one of these set up with LIRC

A better option is a "FreeSat remote" which have the PVR buttons as well as dedicated buttons for recorded TV and media.

The good thing about LIRC is that you can configure as many remotes as you like - in my setup I have 3 remotes all configured to control my Kodi installation.

Jonathan Thomson

Just to add, in the interest of research, I purchased a Raspberry Pi 3 and it is indeed many times faster in use than the B+ model, the Kodi interface is much more fluid even when fullscreen video is playing. I've not tried high definition video (such as MKV) over the network as my B+ struggled with some high bitrate files but I'll try those and update accordingly.

Jacket Tayta

Excellent. Please let me know as this type of setup might be perfect for the kids rooms.
Appreciate everyone's input.

Jonathan Thomson

Turns out the one video that was causing me hassle was indeed HEVC (h.265) which the Pi (and pretty much any low powered media device at the moment) struggles to play. I tried overclocking the Pi but got undervolt warnings so I'm going to remux that file to h.264 instead.

Note to self: check the encoder used in future :P

So the Pi 3 works absolutely fine with;
1080p h264 with various audio formats (including the master/HD formats)
1080i broadcast TV (from satellite and terrestrial)
Normal TV broadcasts (obviously)
Recorded TV (via TVHeadend)

Jacket Tayta

Awesome. Picking up my media centre pc Friday having loaned her out so I'm quite looking forward to having a plat with all this!

Must mention putting another dish out back to the wife....can host it all in the garage then.