What do I need for Live TV
#1
Hi everyone

Since I got Sickbeard & couchpotato setup and working correctly on my server, I am now planning on cancelling my paid subscription for satelite TV as I very rarely watch it anymore.

What I want to know is what I need to do to get live free to air satelite tv in XBMC.

I do not need to record and not really interested in bleeding edge features.

All I want is:

A channel list with channel names
An EPG

All software / hardware will be installed on my front end machine which is an Acer Revo R3700 running windows 7 64 bit.

What version of XBMC do I need and what other software do I need to make it work?

I will also need to buy a usb receiver so recommendations would be appreciated.

Cheers
Gaz
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#2
Anyone?
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#3
I would go with linux and not windows, xbmc pre darhma with pvr, for usb i'd buy tevii 660 and would use tvheadend and xmltv for epg.
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#4
illiac4 Wrote:I would go with linux and not windows, xbmc pre darhma with pvr, for usb i'd buy tevii 660 and would use tvheadend and xmltv for epg.

Unfortunately I have specialist software that I need for my busniness running on both my front end machine and my server that is only available on Windows.

Due to this I have to stay with Windows.
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#5
Then as far as i know your only option is mediaportal as pvr and livetv.
http://www.scintilla.utwente.nl/~marcelg...r-doc.html
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#6
I would recommend that you take a look at ForTheRecord as well.

http://www.4therecord.eu/forum/viewtopic...=20&t=1600

I have been using it with DVB-T tuners & XBMC for a couple of months but just added a Dual DVB-S2 tuner recently.

I'm still getting the kinks ironed out but I have been live streaming Freesat HD Channels fairly well (Having a few problems with Channel 4 HD)

Fortherecord really comes into it's own with it's recording rules though so might not be of so much interest for you if its purely live TV you want.

Same source for the build as the MediaPortal one.

http://www.scintilla.utwente.nl/~marcelg...build.html
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#7
whats fortherecord like for live tv? can it stream multiple live channels at the same time?

I'm starting to build a media server/pvr and will have 8 dvb-s2 tuners in totals. I know tvheadend will work great but i would like to use windows.
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#8
I have had about 12 DVB-t streams (from 4 tuners) recording over the lan to a NAS and if you look at this thread you will see that someone has managed to simultaneously record 23 encrypted DVB-C streams

http://www.4therecord.eu/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1678

They had some corruption though when doing that.

One of the nice things about 4tr though is that you can scale it out so if one box cant handle the load then you can add another recorder box and it all gets managed via a single service which would select a free tuner from an available box.
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#9
thanks for the reply

Watch are live streams like, are the channel changes slow?

Also, if you have channel mapped for one tuner and have them in an order you like, can you copy them to another tuner?
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#10
I have only had the DVB-S2 card (TBS6981) a couple of days so I am still tweaking, also I understand that this is still under heavy development so I am not too critical but...

Quality - generally really good, im still experimenting with deinterlace settings and it seems as if some channels need different settings for the best effect - particularly on HD channels.

Channel Changes are quite slow - Maybe 5-10 Seconds (from a revo remote client). Also I have been experiencing a problem I have seen others report elsewhere with lockups on some channel changes (particularly switching from S to S2 channels). I dont think this is fortherecord specific. So I find it best to stop a channel then choose the new one rather than live zap. - For my own use I mainly record channels and watch later though.

Pausing live TV doesn't seem to work for me at the moment.

For channel mapping it takes a little while to get to grips with the way that fortherecord works but it's very powerful.

When you scan with a tuner you get a channel list which 4tr calls services, you then go to the next tuner and assign those services to it, only takes a few seconds.

When you have your services scanned you can create channels which link to those services (and EPG feeds if they are separate) so there is only one channel list for all tuners (you can create and order groups of channels as well) xbmc picks up the groups OK but I am struggling to get it to order them correctly.
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#11
dry_flood Wrote:All I want is:

A channel list with channel names
An EPG

All software / hardware will be installed on my front end machine which is an Acer Revo R3700 running windows 7 64 bit.

Why don't you simply use windows media center? I'm using it since 2006 for watching tv and recording stuff.
I might/will use XBMC when it's not experimental any more but since then Windows Media Center does the job...
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#12
illiac4 Wrote:Then as far as i know your only option is mediaportal as pvr and livetv.
http://www.scintilla.utwente.nl/~marcelg...r-doc.html

Mediaportal works pretty well with this XBMC branch. Also... MediaPortal TV server is an excellent piece of software (and that's coming from a dedicated Linux user Smile ). My Asrock ION 330HT isn't powerful enough to decode HDTV and run Windows 7 (highly optimized for performance) + MySQL server + Mediaportal TV Server + XBMC. It fails dramatically at decryption while decoding my HD channels. No matter what codec or decryption method I use.

I Bought the Anysee E30 C Plus external TV (DVB-T and DVB-C supported) USB card, which is working very well on my fast desktop PC, but I'm selling it after one day of usage because I needed it for my HTPC. It did work pretty well using Linux on my HTPC, but using the SmartCard that comes with my paid HDTV subscription was a pain in the ass (using a separate USB smartcard reader) and the Linux TV backends aren't nearly as good as MediaPortal TV server. It's really easy to configure and is a solid and stable peace of software. I've used it for years with SD TV.
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#13
Hi there, on the same subject, I would like to get the necessary hardware to watch & record live TV or my recorded shows from AT&T Uverse. Not sure if this can be integrated to XBMC, but it would be great.

My HTPC has a Moneual Moncaso 312 case which is a slim case, so I would need half hight card. Any suggestions on what I need to get?
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#14
ForTheRecord is nice, clean and easy to set up. However. It is very slow in switching channels and might be slightly too limited.

I've found that MediaPortal works the best. A bit harder to configure, but it offers much more flexibility and using the TSReader plugin channel switching actually works using CH+/CH- commands and it's faster, takes about 2-3 seconds.

I'm using a Technotrend TT-1500 tuner with CI expansion module. There's no need to go with Linux for this, it works just fine on Windows.
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#15
is it possible at the moment to watch the mediaportal channels through multiple xbmc pc's?

My plan is to have a server pc with multiple tv tuners and then have numerous xbmc clients.

also it is possible to access the epg and set up recordings through a web browser?
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