Change channel from both Kodi clients

[paulofcorinth]

The setup:

In the living room I have a Hauppage HVR-1250 installed on my HTPC. My coaxial input goes from the wall to the DirectTV cable box and RCAs have been ran from the cable box to the HVR-1250. I have my TV connected to the HTPC via an HDMI cable. On the HTPV I have NextPVR 3.66 as the back end and Kodi 15.2 Isenguard as the front end. Things work great! I can Watch live TV as well as record. I can watch the recorded TV shows as well no problem. Again, it all works perfectly.

The problem:

Since this was going great I setup an unused laptop up in the bedroom and installed Kodi 15.2. It connected to NextPVR just fine and I can watch and record live TV. The problem arises when the living room TV has live TV playing and I go upstairs on the other client to change the channel. I get the error "Tuner not available". I am guessing it is because only one client can have control of the tuner at a time. If I change the channel upstairs to match the downstairs it works but still won't let me change it to a different channel. If I press stop on the live TV downstairs the upstairs client can then start changing the channel. This also happens if the situation is reversed.

The Question:

Is there a way for one client to "relinquish control" of the tuner once another attempts to "gain control" or would this require a second tuner? I tried turning off the time shifting feature on both clients but that did not help. I tried googling quite a bit but could not find the answer. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

[sub]

Is there a way for one client to "relinquish control" of the tuner once another attempts to "gain control" or would this require a second tuner?

You'd need to stop live tv on one device. The remaining live tv viewer would then be able to change channels, because the tuner would no longer be locked on that channel by existing clients watching it.

At the end of the day, an analog tuner can only be tuned to one channel at a time.

[paulofcorinth]

At the end of the day, an analog tuner can only be tuned to one channel at a time.

Can you please recommend a digital tuner that will allow me to do what I am trying to do?

[sub]

In your setup, you're wanting to record from a DirecTV set top box, so you're pretty much limited to analog tuners. Keep in mind your DirecTV box is only capable of outputting one channel at a time too. If you want to have two clients able to watch two different DirecTV channels at the same time, you'd effectively need two analog tuners and two DirecTV boxes. (you can get dual analog tuner devices like the Hauppauge HVR-2250, but you'd also need an extra DirecTV box and IR blaster).

A digital tuner would only be useful for you if you were connected directly to an antenna or digital cable.

[paulofcorinth]

Thank you very much for your help. I appreciate it. Sounds like the setup I have is the best I can have which I think is pretty awesome. Thank you again!

[JavaWiz]

You don't state where you are from exactly, but if you have OTA channels (Over the Air) that you can tune in via a antenna, you might check out a Silicon Dust device (Connect or Extend). This would provide an additional two tuners for the local channels, however, would not give any access to your DirectTV channels.

You can see what OTA channels are available in your area at antennaweb.org by supplying either your address or zip code.

[johnsonx42]

have you considered adding a digital tuner and antenna? depending on where you live, you may get a decent selection of digital broadcast channels. NextPVR will happily take care of different tuner types with different channel lineups, so even when the DirecTV box is busy you can still have channels to watch/record. If you've not looked into what stations you might get with an antenna, go to http://www.antennaweb.org.

(@javawiz - JINX!)