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Full Version: Does XMBC 11.0 support TV card?
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XMBC is one of the famous media center softwares for HTPC. I like it very much. The only shortcoming in windows system is watching live TV by TV card. Does the lastest version XMBC support TV card directly? If it supports, how to set up and play? Your rapid response is highly appreciated.
XBMC PVR connects to a tv backend server which has to support the tv card. The tv server can run on the same machine as XBMC or somewhere else.
And the 'backend' will also depend on what type of tuner you are using. I am in the U.S. and use Hauppauge Colossus tuners with MediaPortal, FTR (For The Record) and a PVR build of XBMC.

Backends:
MediaPortal supports many types of Analog & Digital cards.
FTR Argus supports Digital & ATSC/QAM cards.
MythTV - See their website for cards supported.
TVHeadEnd - See their website for cards supported.
VDR - See their website for cards supported.

XBMC is very unique in how it supports multiple back-ends, giving the user the freedom to choose a backend that fits their system.

Good luck!
Hi all,

Thanks for your detail explanation. I understand, but I usually use dvbviewer to watch Live TV on my HTPC. My TV card is Prof8000 DVB-S2. Does Dvbviewer can be a TV backend server for XMBC? if yes, could you please advise how to make it happen? Thank you very much.
I guess that DvbViewer could act as a backend, but nobody created a backend-addon for it yet. So no, you can't currently use DvbViewer as Backend. If you're on Windows, give 4theRecord a try (http://4therecord.eu/) and use a PVR-build from Margro (http://www.scintilla.utwente.nl/~marcelg...build.html) which has the 4theRecord backend implemented.
Hi da-anda,

Thanks a lot for your reply. It seems that currently watching live TV by TV card in XMBC is kind of complex to me. Is there any development plan to have XMBC support TV card directly, in order wards, we can simply scan live TV channels in XMBC just like Dvbviewer as long as the TV card is installed correctly?
*XBMC
(2012-04-11, 19:31)alan Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks a lot for your reply. It seems that currently watching live TV by TV card in XMBC is kind of complex to me. Is there any development plan to have XMBC support TV card directly, in order wards, we can simply scan live TV channels in XMBC just like Dvbviewer as long as the TV card is installed correctly?

No, there are no plans for a builtin TV-tuner support in XBMC, simply for the fact that this is a very complex task to do and even more complex when you need to support multiple operating systems like we do. Also, why should we when there already are good backends available that we can use. Currently you have the best PVR experience on Linux with the tvheadend backend which runs very smoothly. And plans are that you can manage all (or most of) your PVR stuff from within XBMC (like scanning for new channels etc), but XBMC will only act as frontend and forward the tasks to the backends. Actually there already is a "scan for new channels" button in the PVR settings available, but I haven't seen a backend yet that supports it (probably tvheadend does, but it's Linux and I'm a windows guy).

And it's really not that hard to get PVR running. On windows, just install the 4theRecord backend which is really easy to setup and configure and grab and install a PVR-enabled windows build from Margro.

edit:
but who knows, maybe somebody is one day writing a PVR-addon that itself is a backend and not just a connector. But as I said - there are currently no plans for it by the team.