What do I need for Live TV

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

Anyone?

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.

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.

Then as far as i know your only option is mediaportal as pvr and livetv.
http://www.scintilla.utwente.nl/~marcelg...r-doc.html

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

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.

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.

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?

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.