Welcome a newbieâ¦.. Then mentor himâ¦.

Cyborgbob · 2017-09-21, 03:36 AM

Hello NextPVR. I do hope everyone is doing well tonight. I would like to start by saying I am new to NextPVR, I am new to the DIY Cable world, and I am not an IT Pro. I have only been working with DIY Cable for less then a year, and I hope that I can get a system that is similar to the standard STBâs that my family has been using for years, and one that will be large enough to cover all of my TV Sets.

Background I live in a multi-generation, multi-family home. My family, My sisters family, and my Mom and Dad. In total we have 8 people in this house, and we have 9 cable TV sets. Not everyone in the house is tech savvy, and everyone in the family would like a point and click setup like what we have with the cable company. I have tried many times to come up with a working solution to the point and click setup, but it just seems to not be in the cards. Then I learned about Kodiâs PVR HDhomerun Client. I had all but given up the search till I found Kodi. You see I had thought Kodi was just a way to steal Moves, and that is great and all, but it had not filled the cable TV need I had deep inside me. The plug-in was something I thought the whole family would be able to use.

My current setup (which is built off of several failed attempts) is 2 HDhomerun Primes, 1 HDhomerun Connect, two Raspberry Pi 3 systems (Learned about them when I found out what Kodi can do. LON.TV off of Youtube btw) Each Raspberry Pi 3 has Kodi installed and really only acts as a frontend for NextPVR, and Plex. NPVR is on an old server I got that was once a surveillance NVR for a bank. It has Win 10 Pro 64 bit and I UN-installed as much as I could from the base OS to try and give it a boost , 4 Gig of ram (I think this is okay because you donât need much to trans-code right?), with an Intel Celeron G530 @2.40GHz (Not sure, but I think this Passmark on this is kinda low, and I may need to get that worked on).

What I would like to do is have a Tivo downstairs in the living room that way the family can enjoy HBO and Showtime, but all of the other 8 TV sets I would like for them to use a small PC like a Raspberry or one of the other small PC systems I have hanging out. (I may have tried WMC with a Nuc, and a few smaller PCâs I got from Ebay. Not the best setup). What would work for my family best is something just like a cable company STB. All we have to do is turn on the TV, and pick up the remote, then start changing the channel. I would also like to spend as little cash on this as I can. So I would love to use the Raspberry as my Standard STB to cover all TV I have donât have STB for yet, and to make it easy on the less tech savvy in the house I will need to âSTBsâ to stay on and streaming 24/7.

So in my minds eye I see the PNVR as my backend, the 8 Raspberry Pi 3 as STB frontends, I would like 4 HDhomerun Primes, 3 to cover the TV sets, and 1 to cover the DVR Needs of the family, and my 1 HDhomerun Connect.(I only got that because of the deal I got). Again the Tivo for the main STB for HBO and Showtime downstairs in the living room.

My questions are as follows:
Will a single PNVR work as a backend for all my frontends?
I am sure my gig network will hold the bandwidth as each HDhomerun will only use 30M per unit when all channels are working. So that would be 140M (with the connect at 20M) if all channels of all Hdhomeruns are being used all at the same time. What I donât know is how the PNVR works with HDhomerun?
Does this unit take over and channel all of the video when watching TV, or does it only take control when it is making a recording?
Are there setting I can use to streamline the system? I have seen a ton of stuff about decoders What are the best to use?
Will my ideas work with the configuration I have in my head, or is this all just a pipe dream?

And one thing I have to ask that is a bit off subject. IPTV? I would kinda like to get HBO (with a paid for service I donât wish to set it up a buch), on these sets too, but I am not sure if streaming channels though my network to multipliable STBs is cool or not? Any Ideas on that?

Anyways I want to thank anyone who as taken the time to read all of this. I know it was a ton of stuff.

Graham · 2017-09-21, 11:41 AM

What you are proposing is do-able. Simply stated, if you can get NextPVR up and running with one Raspberry Pi ... you can get it up and running with eight. The issues that will arise might include ...

Network bandwidth - I would not recommend transcoding because it adds technical complexity so you would need the network capacity to have eight (theoretically) streams going to and from the server.
NextPVR is not multi-user. There is only one list of Recordings ... a recording made by Grandma can be accessed and viewed and deleted by anyone.
NextPVR is still not multi-use. Little Billy could force NextPVR to let him commandeer a tuner to watch Live TV causing NextPVR to switch off the Live TV to Grandma.

For digital TV streams, the load on the server is negligible. The server does little more than copy the stream arriving from the tuner to the disk during recording and then copies the file from the disk to the client device during playback. These copy processes do not place much load on the server because they are transferring relatively small amounts of data per second compared to the maximum throughput of the disk.

If am ignorant regarding the complexities of US Cable TV ... is there a place for Cable Card in all this to eliminate the need for a Tivo or other STB?

Cyborgbob · 2017-09-21, 02:05 PM

As far as Cable Cards I have to have them for each of my Primes, but even with the cable cards I can not see Premium Channels Like HBO unless I am using WMC, or Tivo. I have seen that Windows 10 with HDHR viewer will work soon, and the new Xbox. This is why I will have to have a Tivo Box in the living room. I do understand that anyone can watch or delete anything at any time regardless of who started the recording and who or who has not watched it. The System that Xfinity (my cable company) has is the same. Everyone on one profile. We have learned to live with this, and to simply ask if it is cool to delete things before anyone takes action.

As far as Little Billy commandeering a tuner and switching off Grandmas Live TV. Should not the extra channels I provide keep that from happening? I am not sure I understand. My current understanding is HDHomerun, and NextPVR will always use unused channel first. Is this wrong?

Graham · 2017-09-21, 04:59 PM

Cyborgbob Wrote:As far as Little Billy commandeering a tuner and switching off Grandmas Live TV. Should not the extra channels I provide keep that from happening? I am not sure I understand. My current understanding is HDHomerun, and NextPVR will always use unused channel first. Is this wrong?

Simply stated, digital channels are bundled and "broadcast" with multiple channels on a single frequency. A tuner device tunes to a frequency and is then receiving all of the channels on that frequency. NextPVR uses this "muxing" and is able to record a show on any or all of the channels that share the same frequency using a single tuner. However, if you have, for example, six tuners and NextPVR is recording six shows from six different frequencies, NextPVR will be using all six of your tuners. So, little Billy can start to watch Live TV and tell NextPVR to stop recording one show on one frequency to allow him to watch Live TV using that tuner. But ... but ... I don't know how this frequency sharing works in US cable TV or with the tuner devices that you are using. For example, it may be that the tuner devices only ever send a single channel across the network to NextPVR.

Cyborgbob · 2017-09-22, 12:17 AM

Yeah I have no idea about UK Cable really or if you guys have the same HDhomerun products as we do. If my understanding of the US market is correct (and anyone in the US that knows HDhomerun well, please let me know if i am wrong) the way our HDhomerun Product works is like this: HDhomerun Primes have 3 tuners in each unit, and use cable via a cable card that you have to get programmed from your Cable company. The HDhomerun Connect has 2 tuners and works with OTA. My "System Design" is to use 4 Primes with 8 Kodi Units acting as set top boxes. That will give me 12 cable tuners for those 8 Kodi Units. So 12 tuners being used by 8 Kodi units I will have 4 tuners to free to use for the NextPVR. With this set up I believe I should have all the channels that I need. Please let me know if you see something different.

BrettB · 2017-09-22, 12:33 AM

Graham Wrote:Simply stated, digital channels are bundled and "broadcast" with multiple channels on a single frequency. A tuner device tunes to a frequency and is then receiving all of the channels on that frequency. NextPVR uses this "muxing" and is able to record a show on any or all of the channels that share the same frequency using a single tuner.

This functionality (multi-record of multiple channels on a single frequency) only applies to Clear QAM digital cable. With the Cable Card, the tuner can only access one logical channel at a time regardless of which other logical channels are on the same physical channel frequency.

BrettB · 2017-09-22, 12:57 AM

Cyborgbob Wrote:If my understanding of the US market is correct (and anyone in the US that knows HDhomerun well, please let me know if i am wrong) the way our HDhomerun Product works is like this: HDhomerun Primes have 3 tuners in each unit, and use cable via a cable card that you have to get programmed from your Cable company. The HDhomerun Connect has 2 tuners and works with OTA. My "System Design" is to use 4 Primes with 8 Kodi Units acting as set top boxes. That will give me 12 cable tuners for those 8 Kodi Units. So 12 tuners being used by 8 Kodi units I will have 4 tuners to free to use for the NextPVR. With this set up I believe I should have all the channels that I need. Please let me know if you see something different.

I would say that this is basically correct. You don't specify exactly what you mean by "12 tuners being used by 8 Kodi units..." There are actually several ways for Kodi on an RPi (I'm presuming with LibreElec) to access an HDHR Prime tuner and play a channel. Right off, I can think of at least 4 for sure:

Use the SiliconDust HDHomeRun Viewer Add-on
Use the NextPVR Add-on accessing the NextPVR Server to Watch a Channel Live
Use the X-NEWA Add-on with it set to access to NextPVR Server to Watch a Channel Live
Use the X-NEWA Add-on with it set to access the HDHR directly to watch a channel live (this bypasses the NextPVR server)
I think that you could also setup a media source in Kodi to access the HDHR via DLNA (but I'm not sure about this one)

Each of these has pros and cons. Personally, I use #4. Unfortunately, with the HDHR you are somewhat limited in the ability to control which client(s) use which tuner(s). For instance with the HDHomeRun add-on, it will just use any available HDHR tuner it sees on the network, and you have 0 control over that. Now with the NextPVR server, you can specifically disable certain tuners so that it will never try to use them and you have some ability to prioritize the order of the tuners to be used.

I think that if you have 12 tuners and only 8 clients, you would probably have enough capacity to handle the load. But, it might be a little tricky because I don't think that you're going to have any way to actually dedicate one tuner to each client.

Graham · 2017-09-22, 11:03 AM

BrettB Wrote:I think that if you have 12 tuners and only 8 clients, you would probably have enough capacity to handle the load. But, it might be a little tricky because I don't think that you're going to have any way to actually dedicate one tuner to each client.

To reinforce this ... NextPVR is not able to "share" tuner devices with other applications. If you use "not NextPVR" to access a tuner, you will need to disable that tuner in NextPVR to be sure that NextPVR never attempts to use the tuner while it is in use by another app.

My vote would be to use only NextPVR (including inside Kodi as a RPi client) ... you could always try other apps later on if you are not getting the results that you want with NextPVR.

Within Kodi, there are two NextPVR "addons" ... The choice might depend upon whether you want your Kodi users to make use of all of the functions of Kodi. The NextPVR addon sits within Kodi and you would use Kodi functions to view the EPG and create recordings and all that.

X-newa is, simply stated, all of NextPVR inside of Kod ... viewing the EPG and creating recordings is done in an interface that looks just like NextPVR.

I don't use Kodi ... my observations from reading countless posts in this forum is that X-newa is more reliable because it is less liable to be disrupted by the idiosyncrasies of Kodi (and its developers). Again ... X-newa is not for life, it is just for Christmas ... if you are not getting the result that you want with X-newa ... you can switch to the "official" NextPVR addon.