Can Tvheadend access a remote HDHomeRun?

Jan X

I'm a complete Tvheadend newb but I've done a lot of reading and made sort of an ideal setup inside my head and I'm wondering if this setup is technically possible.

Like the thread title says I'm wondering if Tvheadend can access a HDHomeRun on a remote location (so in a completely different network).

I would put the HDHomeRun in my own home (where I can connect it to my TV provider's DVB-C coax cable) but I want to run Tvheadend on a dedicated server in a data center. As I'm on a 1000Mbps FTTH internet connection (and the dedicated server that would run Tvheadend has a 1Gbps connection as well) bandwidth should be no issue right? Could latency cause issues in this setup? What would be an upper limit latency-wise?

I read that 1080p HD channels from the HDHomeRun take about 15Mbps bandwith so if I were to record 4 HD channels simultaneously using Tvheadend that would take about 60Mbps (which would thus be the theoretical max)?

So is all this technically possible or do the HDHomeRun and Tvheadend absolutely need to be in the same local network?

Thanks!

Robert Cameron

Not easily. The way the HDHR client works you need to be on the same subnet for the broadcast/discover packets sent to work. You may be able to do this with a static route between subnets, but I haven't tried this approach myself.

To test it, add the static routes to your interface's routing table and run

hdhomerun_config discover

on your Tvheadend machine and see if it sees the devices. If so, then it'll work.

Jan X

Thank you for your reply!

Ah I see, I was hoping Tvheadend would communicate with the HDHomeRun through some HTTP API or something so that just opening some ports in my router would suffice. But as I now understand it, in order to get my proposed setup to work, I would probably have to setup a VPN and route broadcast packets over the VPN. I have no idea how to configure that and I would need to run a separate server for that as well as my router sure won't support that. In that case I'm probably better off with running the Tvheadend server locally as that will probably save me a lot of headaches.

I might look into running Tvheadend or a Raspberri Pi (or similar) locally if it can handle that. I will read a bit about that and will probably return with some questions regarding that but I'll open a new thread for that as those questions will be different from what I've asked here.

Robert Cameron

I don't believe the DVB models of the HDHR devices allow for direct HTTP streaming, only the US CableCARD Prime does.

You can run Tvheadend locally, and export the server over Sat>IP; then run Tvheadend on your hosted server, using your local Tvheadend Sat>IP instance as the input. Realistically, though, that's a lot of bandwidth going back and forth, and I doubt with the latency you'd be happy with the result.

Jan X

Robert Cameron wrote:

> You can run Tvheadend locally, and export the server over Sat>IP; then run Tvheadend on your hosted server, using your local Tvheadend Sat>IP instance as the input. Realistically, though, that's a lot of bandwidth going back and forth, and I doubt with the latency you'd be happy with the result.

Thatcould be very interesting if it's possible to do the descrambling at the remote location too. Then I could run a very small low powered Tvheadend server at home (Raspberry Pi or something) and have the server at the remote location do all the actual work (descrambling with softcam and optionally transcoding). Latency between home and remote location is about 14ms so that's only marginally worse than a home network setup I guess (but I'm no network or streaming expert) and bandwidth is abundant as well.

Robert Cameron

I'm afraid I can't really offer additional help with regards to that. However, if you do get it working, a report back with perhaps some info in the steps you took to get it working, would be appreciated and might help others down the line.