Kodi, TVH OpenELEC etc.

Tom Johnson

Posted this over in the Kodi forum, but also wanted to post here.

After getting my OpenELEC RPi working with TVheadend, I had a thought about how this works and just wanted clarification.

As I understand it, Kodi is pretty much a standalone program. TVheadend allows you to connect Live TV to a Kodi system. So, as I see it I can have a basic Linux box with TVheadend installed on it without Kodi and still be able to stream live TV, correct? I would simply configure OpenELEC to connect to the server just like I do now but instead of it being a Kodi server, it's just a Linux box, right?

Hope I explained this right. I know when I had Plex, I had to have Plex server in the backend and then I could have different clients as the front end. I don't think Kodi works like that. I think Kodi is a stand alone app that allows you to connect to different shared sources, such as TVheadend or a SMB share for media.

Correct me if I am wrong.

Robert Cameron

That is correct (and similar to my setup). I have a small NUC-type computer that runs TVH. It records to a NFS mount on a 6TB NAS. The live feeds are served to other computers in the house that run Kodi and pvr.hts, but the computer running TVH does not have Kodi (or even X/Wayland) installed at all.

Tom Johnson

Killer! I'm looking to use OpenMediaVault as my NAS and installing TVheadend on it (now that I know how it works). This way I have a small footprint server that I can store local media on as well as serve up Live TV. Need to buy a couple more RPi's.

Quick question though...which front end client works best with RPi?

A L

Robert Cameron wrote:

> That is correct (and similar to my setup). I have a small NUC-type computer that runs TVH. It records to a NFS mount on a 6TB NAS. The live feeds are served to other computers in the house that run Kodi and pvr.hts, but the computer running TVH does not have Kodi (or even X/Wayland) installed at all.

Could you possibly confirm what your running TVH on (i.e. on your "small NUC-type computer)?

Is there any reason why you do not have TVH running directly on your NAS?

Robert Cameron

My "NUC" is a Gigabyte Brix with a small i3 processor. The reason it runs TVH and not my NAS is because the NAS is arm-based, and I don't really care to maintain a toolchain to build packages for it. I run a custom build of TVH that allows me to use the HDHomeRun support to tune my CableCARD-based Primes, which reduces continuity errors and makes for reliable recordings. I also use Schedules Direct's JSON service, and the XMLTV grabber requires some binary libraries which are not easily found or compiled for the NAS.