Over the Air HDTV tuner and XBMC
#1
I live in a hurricane prone are of the USA. I receive TV via satellite. When it rains, TV drops out.
I have installed a HDTV antenna in my attic which works pretty well.
I have an always on PC/media server in my home, that I run XBMC on to serve music around my house.

Can I easily use a USB TV Tuner to receive the HDTV antenna signal on my media server and then DLNA broadcast it to my android devices running XBMC?
Does XBMC naively transcode to other XBMC devices that require it?

Any recommendations for USB DTV tuners for this project?
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#2
XBMC itself won't play with a TV tuner - that's the job of 'backend' PVR software. Depending on your OS, you might want to look at Mediaportal, Argus, tvheadend, MythTV... and the rest, really, there's a whole section of this forum dedicated to them.

The backend then talks over IP (UDP, I think) to a PVR-specific addon in XBMC. So you don't need to transcode or use DLNA/UPnP, as you've now got a client-server conversation. Addons work on all XBMC platforms, I think - certainly my tvheadend instance talks quite happily to Linux, Windows and Android clients, and I've no reason to believe it wouldn't talk to iOS as well.

USB TV tuners are plentiful and many support HD, depending on how it's encoded for you. The biggest issue is your OS choice, as Windows inevitably has better support than Linux in my experience, so Linux types like me start with "will it work at all" before we move on to "will it work well".
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#3
Thanks for the info, and I am a Windows user.
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#4
I like using a HD HomeRun. It connect to you network and streams over the network to your connected devices. If you don't need pvr, you can even set it up in sources (or something like that, it's been a while since I last did that) and watch it that way. They even have a version out now that will transcode the streams for you for lower power devices like android that don't normally handle mpeg2 very well.
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#5
My HDTV backend server set-up here:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1723404
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#6
www.mygicausa.com, you can buy a USB one or PCie one
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Over the Air HDTV tuner and XBMC0