Hi, team osmc. I’m not after any guarantees, just your best educated guess if you don’t mind. Do you think the osmc tv tuner would be less sensitive to interference than my current Hauppage WinTV Dual HD tuner, or have any other performance advantages?
Hauppage tuner is currently connected to an osmc usb hub (which is connected to Vero’s usb2 slot- I have a ssd connected to Vero’s usb3 slot) and working well, but every so often the picture will freeze and a buffering notification shows up. Often it’ll correct itself and resume playing.
Performance can be flawless for days or even a week, so the picture freeze feels odd. I did have to use a usb extension cable to move the Hauppage away from the Vero/ hub after purchasing the hub recently, as I was getting lots of consistent drops - moving it dramatically improved things
However, my router isn’t far away from the tuner now, hence my question about osmc tuner sensitivity. I suspect these issues have nothing to do with the Vero itself, more my environment. Thanks.
Does it happen on recordings? If it happens on a recording can you stop it and then play it again over that same spot and get perfect playback? If it does then you probably have issues with something to do with the playing back certain quirks in the broadcast stream, not an issue with the tuner. I have a few stations that are very prone to doing this while others are not. I’m in a different country with a different broadcast standard, using a different tuner than you so take that for what it is worth.
FWIW. I run TVHeadend on a separate linux box. Two TBS PCI dual tuner cards. Rock solid. I used to test all sorts of USB tuners before, but no one, not even the expensive ones worked without issues.
Interesting. Never heard of these before - will have to research. I moved away from running tvheadend server on a separate Linux box (rpi5), mainly because I didn’t want tv to be dependent on my router behaving itself, which it wasn’t at the time, and still randomly reboots itself occasionally.
Be interested to know your setup if you have the time, but no worries if not. Thanks
Stick a switch in as the main hub and hang your router off that. You could switch to fixed IP’s for anything important and your router could reboot itself and go stupid all it wants and it won’t affect LAN access. Also, FWIW, my HD Homerun Flex 4K with paid DVR service and a hard drive attached to the box has been sitting in my network rack for years and not had any issues at all. It is used as the only live TV source for multiple TV’s.
Thanks - I did not know this. Having done a little research after reading your post, it seems that if both tvheadend client and server devices are connected to the switch, the tvheadend LAN connection will stay up even if the router reboots.
I was under the impression the switch connections would also go down in this case, which is what was happening in the past when using a switch with my tvheadend server on a separate device - I think the mistake I was making was having either both client and server devices connected to the router, or one to the router and the other to the switch.
I sold my HDHomeRun flex a while ago, but with this in mind, I’m tempted to repurchase. Was a great device and from what I’ve read, is less likely to be subject to interference (better protective casing, no usb bus interference)
A consumer router is typically just a number of devices combined together in a single box. The actual “router” part is essentially a computer that is providing services such as routing, firewall, DNS, etc. This computer is effectively plugged into to a switch inside the box. When you reboot this combination device you also reboot the switch. Anything you have connected to it has its connections severed as well. By having a seperate switch where everything gets plugged into including the router it means that when you reboot the router the only connection that gets cut off is for the router itself. With the router down the other devices can still talk to each other as long as they still know how to find each other. With the router down DNS becomes unavailable and when it comes back up, it may, depending on the device and configuration, reset its DNS assignments (what IP address goes to which device). The DNS becoming temporarily unavailable isn’t normally a problem on client devices unless they get restarted as well. Most client devices will keep a cached copy of the routing. The resetting of device assignments can be an issue though so it is best to set static IP’s for anything structural like a NAS, File server, network tuner/PVR backend. The way to do this is to set these devices in the router as having a static IP address. You would then go to the devices themselves and also set their IP on the device to this same static IP address. In this way the router will never try to hand a different device that address, and if the device reboots when the router is down it still gets the correct address.
Sure. This is not dependent on the router at all as the server and Vero are in the same internal network. I have a server box, running SuSE linux in the basement. In it do I have two PCI cards TBS6281SE each card has two tuners and I have one connected to the antenna (DVB-T) and the other to cable (DVB-C). As our channels here have 4 channels per “mux” I can record up to 8 programmes per card depending on what muxes they are on. You have to compile the drivers for the TBC cards for your Linux version, but it is not that difficult. They have been rock-solid compared to the USB tuners I have tried and few of those were really plug and play. The TBS cards are actively supported for Linux, unlike most of the USB tuners.
So just to add, the “router”, ie the fibre modem from the ISP is just our connection to the outside world. The equipment on the inside are all interconnected via managed 1Gb switches. Thus does the connection from the Vero to the tvheadend server run even if the connection to the ISP is down.