HDHomerun live TV

I’m not sure if this was seen but Silicondust just released a Kodi addon that tunes Live TV from a HDHomerun with a guide. NO BACKEND is needed but it’s only live TV and not recording, it’s available in the Kodi video addons repo see here http://kodi.tv/addon-spotlight-hdhomerun-live-tv/

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Awesome find Diligaf!
Do note the update at the moment is beta:
https://www.silicondust.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2484

Have you tried this? Any comment on performance from anyone who has?

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I’m a long time HDHomerun user, but can’t test it as the only supported devices are:

  • HDHomeRun PRIME
  • HDHomeRun CONNECT
  • HDHomeRun EXTEND
  • Future HDHomeRun not yet announced

So if you have any of the older models like HDHR3-US, it won’t work. I personally have a Synology NAS, and run DVBLink, by DVBLogic (http://dvblogic.com/en/) as my PVR and Guide. It’s works really well. You do have to pay for the DVBLink PVR software though, but it’s well worth it in my opinion.

I tried it and it seems to work really well. Some have complained about not being able to turn on deinterlacing, hopefully this will be added soon. This addon was comissioned by Silicondust so it has their support

I found the HDHR plugin and got all excited and then found that it would not find my HDHomerun. I decided to update the firmware and that didn’t help although the firmware mentioned that it added Kodi support. I have one of the original HDHomerun dual ATSC ethernet based tuners. I guess there is no support yet. It supports playback via mplayer and I know it streams well with linux and Plex I think. Hopefully it will be supported one day. Running the 20150406 firmware.

I hope that in future they will release the DVB-T for here in AU and the software for it to work as well… I have an old HDHomeRun so I am guessing that this will not work for me.

One day, Im sure that companies will realise that if they have a product that supports Linux based systems, with backup and software support they will pretty much corner a market that not only will give back to the company providing but also support the living crap out of the product. :smile:

You have to have there dlna tuner, before that addon will work i have the eu DUAL tuner to, and it’s not on the list and will not get on the list… it’s to old now.

They were on Kickstarter and the support has exceeded their expectations by the looks of it.

They will be releasing DVR software and, from my understanding, it will work with Kodi.

Stretch goal achieved: $150,000 stretch goal - HDHomeRun DVR add-on for Kodi (XBMC):

The HDHomeRun Live TV add-on for Kodi proved what a great platform Kodi is to work with. Our promise in return for your support - if we hit $150,000 we will make the HDHomeRun DVR work with Kodi as the client for copy-freely recordings.

HDhomerun Connect available in Australia! …as soon as I can afford it, Im buying 2! :smiley:

Yeah, it is a little more refined than TVheadend, but at $53.80 i’ll monkey around with TVheadend. I actually had similar “issues” with DVBLink TV Source (PVR backend) to what i was having with TVheadend. Mainly, changing channels is best done by hitting the stop button (thanks @HarryL for the pointer) which takes you back to the guide, then selecting the next channel you want to watch. If you attempt to directly change the channel (up or down button), it sometimes get frozen. Also, it seems you don’t have a choice for EPG data with DVBLink TV Source as Perc Data is the only option. I haven’t actually gotten EPG running on TVheadend yet and didn’t bother with setting it up with DVBLink TV Source, but it does seem more straight forward with DVBLink (though the grabber costs an additional $17.57). You also get a free trial period for DVBLink products and for Perc Data membership. So you could try it out before you buy. Also, DVBLink TV Source was running on my Synology NAS which is on an UPS which means that i can still record Live TV even when the power goes out! For me to do that with TVheadend, i’d need another RPi2 running TVheadend that is in my server closet and plugged into the UPS.

Of course, once Silicondust comes out with their PVR backend (publicly), i’ll probably go with that. But that’s a luxury i have being in a location that is serviced by one of the HDHomeRun products.

I would love to hear other peoples’ experience with various Live TV setups (Guide and PVR are “must haves” for me). And, if you’re running TVheadend on a Synology NAS, i’d really love to hear from you.

Hi there @Gmoney ,
You basically have the idea. For myself, I got my first Pi in July of 2012, and shortly after that, I started tinkering with all this Live TV. It was pretty new and still immature. TVHeadend was having problems on the Pi at the time so that’s why I moved onto DVBLink in May of 2014. As for EPG data, I had a few computers and one of them was running Windows 7 liked the data that media center got it’s EPG data from Microsoft. So I used MC2XML (http://mc2xml.hosterbox.net/) to get an XML file of EPG data. I run a scheduled task nightly that downloads the XML EPG data, and copies it to the …/DVBLink/xmltv/ folder. You then configure DVBLink to use that XML data by using this guide: How to configure EPG sources - DVBLink wiki There is no additional cost to consume XML data for EPG. So in the end I paid around 31 Euros (or $48 CDN) to have:

  1. PVR Backend
  2. EPG data (One could say I shouldn’t get this from Microsoft, but I do own a license for Windows 7, so that’s how I validate it…yes, I know, I could be very wrong here. But so far, Microsoft isn’t caring).

The PVR Add-on in Kodi was free and worked flawlessly. Also, what few problems I had, were actually my misconfiguration and the support team at DVBLink was really great (and fast) at resolving them for me.

I’m sure there will be more options as time goes on. So as all the pieces (Kodi, Raspberry Pi, Synology, HDHomerun) mature, solutions for Live TV and PVR with EPG data, should start getting better and better.

Hope this information helps!

That is brilliant, and no, i don’t think there is anything wrong with doing this. I haven’t read the user agreement so it’s a little presumptuous of me to say that, but unless they explicitly say the guide data can’t be copied, i think you’re in the clear. HOWEVER, the whole reason why i’m picking up this topic once again is because MS has been screwing around with the EPG data provider, moving from Zap2It to Rovi. A lot of people (including me) are getting screwed by this. Half of my channels have “no data available”. So, although your method is absolutely brilliant, i would be bound to the same issues i’m currently having if i do this. In fact, i’m quite surprised you too are not having the same issue.

Good catch. I’d had it running for so long that I didn’t realize this change from Zap2It to Rovi has happened. Just checked the data and I can’t get any data past July 26 (2 days from today). Normally I get 2 weeks of data! It’s nice because I can use the web interface to search and record movies, TV shows, etc through the browser.

Looks like I’m going to have to investigate this change, or just pay $25USD/year for http://www.schedulesdirect.org Alternatively, and not as good a choice, is that DVBLink can use the EPG data coming from the OTA TV signals, and generate an EPG from those. The problem is not all (I have 13 HD Channels) contain the EPG data, and certainly not 2 weeks worth.

EDIT: I’m now using http://zap2xml.awardspace.info to generate my XML file as Microsoft sorts its business out.