Move to Raspbery Pi ?

[ceejayemm]

Hi 

I have been using NPVR 4.x, and more recently v5.x, on an aging PC ruinning Windows 10 Home for some time and like the way NPVR works.  This has worked well but the recent purchase of a HDHomeRun Quatro and the the fact that the PC is beginning to show signs of age is making me wonder about replacing the PC with (perhaps) a Raspberry Pi for NPVR and associated program guide data download purposes only. I do however have a number of questions which I need some help answering before I make this leap:

1. What spec of Raspberry Pi is best suited to running NPVR 5.x.  Does the old mantra of most processor / memory for your budget still apply ?

2. Should I install Raspbian as the OS and install NPVR directly to this or use the Docker installation - I have no current experience of Docker but have used various flavours of Linux in the past.

3. To use NPVR Program Guide with the HDHomeRun device requires a seperate process to download the necessary XML data file.  I currently use Digiguide as a source for UK Freeview program data and XMLTV GUI to turn it into format that NPVR can import. This however requires the Digiguide Windows app to provide a web service in order to perform the download.  What do others use to get UK Freeview program data for NPVR use - details of grabbers and sources would be useful.

4. Any first hand experience of using a Raspberry Pi with NPVR v5.x would be greatly received.

Many thanks for any help / advice anybody can provide.

Chris

[mvallevand]

Here is my opinion

- if the server isn't going to be running LibreElec I would avoid Docker there is no advantage especially if you use the deb installer

- if you have a RPi test it first but the only machine I would consider is the RPi 4.

- if you will be doing transcoding (using the v5 browser or Android clients) I wouldn't consider it. That applies if you use an IPTV source which NextPVR has to transcode.

- there are other EPG solutions in the UK. Not sure about OTA with the HDHR but if it works that would be my first choice. your PC will be on 24/7 so you should be able to grab it. If you want an easy solution I'd use Schedules Direct, it's guite reasonably price, fast and the intergration with NextPVR is excellent

- I've used the RPi4 as a v5 server and except for transcoding it was surprisingly good. There are better small PC servers and Kodi clients but you will have a bigger user base and it is still maturing. Heat issues likely won't be bad when you aren't transcoding since NextPVR doesn't stress the server.

-The weak point of any small PC will be using an SD card for the data folder, NextPVR logs a lot, and the temp folder is also used for the database and for tmp files. I'd map the folder to a USB or use a device that has emmc. Make sure you back the folder up for the time the SD card fails.

Martin

[ceejayemm]

Martin

Thanks for the quick response.  

I already use a seperate RPi running the latest Libreelec which I use to access the current PC based NPVR installation. This would remain as the main client for the new RPi based NPVR installation.  In this set up I don't think NPVR transcodes so a direct installation on Rasbian should be OK ?

The HDHomeRun device can't use an OTA EPG so I have been told, so some sort of download process will be necessary.  I will have a look at Schedules Direct for the UK to see if it is any easier / better than Digiguide.

I guess the RPi 4 with 4gb memory will be best suited to this task and now that they are getting them to run cooler that should help too. I can look at getting as much of the data and logging to something other than the SD card. I have a USB based hard drive available which would hold mpost of the recordings etc Or I can network mount storage space on my NAS (OpenMediaVault and NFS  shares)

Thanks again for your help.

Chris

[martinu]

Hi 

I have been using NPVR 4.x, and more recently v5.x, on an aging PC ruinning Windows 10 Home for some time and like the way NPVR works.  This has worked well but the recent purchase of a HDHomeRun Quatro and the the fact that the PC is beginning to show signs of age is making me wonder about replacing the PC with (perhaps) a Raspberry Pi for NPVR and associated program guide data download purposes only. I do however have a number of questions which I need some help answering before I make this leap:

1. What spec of Raspberry Pi is best suited to running NPVR 5.x.  Does the old mantra of most processor / memory for your budget still apply ?

2. Should I install Raspbian as the OS and install NPVR directly to this or use the Docker installation - I have no current experience of Docker but have used various flavours of Linux in the past.

3. To use NPVR Program Guide with the HDHomeRun device requires a seperate process to download the necessary XML data file.  I currently use Digiguide as a source for UK Freeview program data and XMLTV GUI to turn it into format that NPVR can import. This however requires the Digiguide Windows app to provide a web service in order to perform the download.  What do others use to get UK Freeview program data for NPVR use - details of grabbers and sources would be useful.

4. Any first hand experience of using a Raspberry Pi with NPVR v5.x would be greatly received.

Many thanks for any help / advice anybody can provide.

Chris

I can't comment on Next PVR on Raspberry Pi, though I'm keen to try it as an alternative to TVHeadend which I currently use on my Pi 3B+ (prior to that I used NextPVR on Windows 7 but wanted a solution that didn't need my power-hungry PC to remain on 24/7. Some of my comments about TVHeadend are probably still valid for NextPVR.

I use Raspbian Stretch, because I want a Pi that can be used for other things (eg logging weather-station data), rather than LibreElec which (as far as I can see) has a rather locked-down user-interface (or did I not investigate very much before dismissing it).

I have found that the Pi is perfectly capable of simultaneously recording one or more channels (SD or HD) on two different multiplexes from two DVB-T2 adapters (Hauppauge Win-TV Nova and PCTV 292e). I don't use the Pi for playing back so I haven't bought an MPEG2 licence; I have shared the directory into which recordings are written, using SMB, and then I access this from my Windows PC to edit out continuity and commercials before saving to the Windows PC and playing on there, so the Pi is used just for recording, which is the only bit of recording that needs the computer to be on 24/7. Having moved house to an area that gets poor terrestrial reception I now use a PCTV 491e DVB-S adapter; shame that I bought two but one was a more recent revision which isn't yet supported by Raspbian.

I started out recording to the SD card system drive, but realised that I might quickly fill up 32 GB so I changed to a spinning HDD and mounted that in /home/pi/Videos.

When I have the courage (because it would probably mean destroying the NextPVR setup) I'll try NextPVR. It does have the advantage that it has a graphical EPG (time versus channel grid) rather than TVH's long list of events which are filtered by starting to type a programme name and/or channel. I might take the coward's way out and reinstall Raspian onto a different SD card and install NextPVR on that, so I can still go back to TVH if I need to.

[ceejayemm]

HI

Got a RPi 4 (4GB) for Christmas and decided to take the plunge and see if I could get NPVR running on it, taking the comments above into account.

The hardware I have is:
RPi 4 - 4GB memory
Pimoroni Fan SHIM for Raspberry Pi
WD MyBook 1TB externally powered disk, which supports USB2 / eSata connections
StarTech.com USB 3.0 to eSATA Adapter

At the time of writing RPi 4 does NOT support native bootting from a USB device.

Here's what I did:

Attached the WD MyBook disk via the eSata connector / StarTech adapter to the RPi 4 USB3 port and powered it up.
Flashed a new microSD card with the current Rasbian Lite OS (Sept 2019). Added a blank 'SSH' file to /boot to allow initial remote access via SSH.
Booted the RPi 4 from this new SD card
Connected to the RPI via SSH
Did NOT at this stage update via apt-get update / upgrade
Downloaded and ran the usb-boot script from https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt...9&t=196778 - this copies the SD contents to the USB connectede disk and makes all the necessary changes to effectively allow the external disk to be the boot device. The bootloader part of the SD card is staill required to allow this to happen so its not 'true' usb booting but allows all the boot disk activiity, logging etc to be directed to the external drive (as per Martin's suggestion above).
Set my router to provide a fixed IP number for the RPi.
Rebooted to make sure all was well, it was.
Ran apt-get update / full-upgrade to pick up all updates / dependancies for OS.
Ran raspi-config to set RPi networek name, secure SSH, check locale settings etc.
Installed NPVR (5.0.1.191224) via the autoinstaller .deb file.
Rebooted (probably not necessary but for peace of mind).
Connected via web app to configure NPVR for HDHomeRun Quatro (already detected devices when I logged in) and configure channels, remote access, Shedules Direct setup etc.
Saved channels and ran EPG update.
Set up a few test recordings to be done overnight.
Left it alone to do its thing.

Reconnected this morning and checked out recordings, seem OK.

The biggest probelm I had with the above was getting the new SanDisk microSD card to flash Raspbian Lite OS reliably, once I got that sorted and the RPi would boot properly the rest fell into place really easily.

One, very minor, point about the auto installer - would it be possible to add something to the end of the process to let the user know where the files have been installed ? I searched for a while to find the files (in /var/opt/nextpvr by default) but it would have been better if the installer could provide this info for us.

Finally, does anybody know an easy way to install ComSkip on a RPi4 for use with NPVR ? The instructions I have found to date need the package to built/installed but none of them quite work for the RPi4.

Thanks to Martin and martinu for their thoughts above on this process which helped to make the whole thing fairly smooth in the end.

Chris

[sub]

Glad you got it working.

It's unlikely the RPi4 will be up to comskip. That is very cpu intensive, and RPi4 doesn't have a lot of cpu.

[jksmurf]

Glad you got it working.

It's unlikely the RPi4 will be up to comskip. That is very cpu intensive, and RPi4 doesn't have a lot of cpu.

That and the setup change (adding an external Colossus-like device, adding external DMTB USB devices to replace my 2 internal cards) are probably the only things that would get me to change from my Windows Server. All other concepts about a low powered 24/7 device that does everything else is pretty attractive.

k.