Thanks. I wish I had read that yesterday, particular the bit about installing Tvheadend on Debian, but I've done that now, and it probably took longer than your suggestion.
I'm not a Windows user so running in a VM under Windows is not something I would attempt.
I have it running now, so will concentrate on how to actually configure the program.
There are over 1800 services and I'm trying to work out how to group them into various categories... once I've figured out how decryption works.