Setting up my first OSMC on Raspberry Pi

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

Hi all,

I was recently given a Raspberry Pi 4 with OSMC and Kodi on it by a generous friend. Basically I want to set it up to a) watch tv and video off my external SSD drive, b) watch free-to-air TV and c) if possible, watch streaming services like Disney Plus etc…

If it is relevant info - I live in AUSTRALIA… G’day.

I have been reading lots of posts and trying to get my head around how all of this stuff works. I must admit, it is not my area of strength, but I am excited to learn a new skill (and abbreviations). I have figured out a few bits and pieces by reading posts, but here are a few questions I have that I am unsure of. I’m hoping that some of you can help explain some of this in “newby” terms.

QUESTION ONE
I want to set my Pi up to watch free-to-air. I have mostly been reading this thread: LINK From what I understand, I need a USB dongle. Does the one sold in the OSMC store work in Australia? Do I need to connect it to my aerial socket in the wall with a cable? Or… is there a different dongle that people here recommend for use in Australia that has its own aerial built in (my home antenna has pretty average reception since I installed solar panels a few years ago).

I also have an old Playstation PlayTV box. Could I use it? (although I am happy to get something a bit more modern if these are considered “old tech”).

QUESTION TWO
Some users here have posted that they needed a separate powered USB hub for their TV tuner. Is this still the case for the the OSMC dongle, or the PlayTV box? Most of the posts that had this info were a few years old now…

QUESTION THREE
A few of the buttons on my Panasonic TV remote seem to work, but I do like the look of the really simple/minimalist OSMC remote. I don’t like a remote with heaps of buttons that I rarely use. Do people here think that the OSMC remote is worth it (I would have to buy it and get it shipped to Australia)?

QUESTION FOUR
Can I watch Disney Plus using Kodi/OSMC on my Raspberry Pi 4? There seemed to be mixed discussion on this forum, and most posts were 4+ years old, so I wasn’t sure what the latest was…

I am sorry for the long post and questions. I am just trying to get my head around all of this.

Thanks so much in advance!!!

2

Depends on your provider.

Who are they? Do you have a link?

You need to find out if they use DVB-C or DVB-T/T2? I would say it’s probably unlikely but don’t honestly know. Australia is a big country and I’ve seen both technologies used as well as neither in some areas.

Should be OK if you have an adequate PSU

I designed it, so I’d say yes. Shipping to Australia is very affordable (£1.49) and without taxes or duties for an item of this value.

I live in AUSTRALIA… G’day.

Your Sheila will approve of the remote.

Can I watch Disney Plus using Kodi/OSMC on my Raspberry Pi 4? There seemed to be mixed discussion on this forum, and most posts were 4+ years old, so I wasn’t sure what the latest was…

It works, but it isn’t in 4K. We have efforts to make it work in full resolution (4K) on Vero V but the Pi doesn’t meet certification requriements (Widevine) to ever get full resolution. It should indeed work however.

Any more questions, let me know.

Sam

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Regarding the PlayTV box I skimmed over the Wikipedia article on it (I was curious, never knew it existed) and it said it actually is supported under Linux so if it is compatible with your current local broadcasting standards it doesn’t seem like a fools errand to me. Regarding the external PSU the deal is that there are power requirements to USB and tuners tend to be a bit power hungry. The RPi 4 has USB 3 ports on it that have a higher current allowance than the older units so it would tend not to be an issue as long as you’re using a decent PSU that has enough overhead for everything plugged into it with some headroom.

Regarding the TV remote (aka CEC) they tend to be a bit basic in default mapping in Kodi, likely due to different TV’s tending to be all over the place with what commands they forward. You can probably gain use of more buttons than you have now, and can tweak the keymap to make them work more like you want (such as a working context menu that often isn’t available without tweaks). That being said the OSMC remote is more responsive, supports long press (holding down a button to perform a secondary function) and the mappings for the OSMC remote have been tweaked to provide as intuitive an experience as I think you will find anywhere.

Kodi is Kodi so anything that isn’t platform specific you can use information you find here, on Kodi’s forum, or just about anywhere else on the interwebs. For things that may be a bit more platform specific OSMC is running Debian Linux and you have access to the operating system under Kodi to do as you wish. This means that if you find a guide for doing “whatever” then it doesn’t have to be on this site. Guides for a lot of other Linux distros will work the same on OSMC.

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Thank you so much, Sam. I will definitely order an OSMC remote once I have explored the USB dongle information. I will try and answer your questions without sounding like too much of a dummy…

I’m not sure what you mean by “provider”. Our free-to-air unencrypted TV service in Australia is this: https://freeview.com.au/

It looks like we have DVB-T in Australia. They have done DVB-T2 trials around some major cities (including Brisbane, where I live), but I can’t find anything about a full upgrade to DVB-T2. The PlayTV unit that works on my old PS3 works and uses DVB-T, so I assume that is the minimum that we have working where I live.

I will try to set up the PlayTV box and the TVHeadend add-on to see if it works, but longer term I might look into the OSMC USB dongle. Here are a few more thoughts that I am trying to work out:

QUESTION FIVE
Does the OSMC USB dongle connect to my home TV antenna, or does it get its TV signal over the internet?

QUESTION SIX
Is there a guide for getting Disney Plus working on Kodi for Raspberry Pi 4? I don’t mind if it isn’t in 4K, but I can’t find where to get the add-on and how to install it…

Once again, thank you so much for your fast and friendly reply earlier!

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The OSMC DVB receiver is equal to the receiver in your TV so yes it needs to be connected to the Antenna.

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Thank you. I will definitely get the OSMC remote. It looks great.

My Pi 4 is using the official Raspberry Pi USB-C Power Supply. It has DC 5.1V 3A output and 15.3W max output power. Do you think that is a sufficient PSU???

I also saw that the OSMC store has heatsinks and Bluetooth dongles. I think I read somewhere that these aren’t really needed for Pi 4. Is that correct?

Thanks again

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Bluetooth not needed as it is built-in to the Pi4.
heatsink not directly needed (depends on usage and also if you use a case)

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That is a good power supply and I wouldn’t expect you to have any issues with it.

Like fzinken said it has bluetooth built in the RPi 4 (and older) do not require a heatsink for normal use cases. That being said there are some people who run external bluetooth adapters to get more range than what your get from the antenna’s baked into the RPi’s motherboard and if you don’t already have a case for the RPi getting one that has a heatsink built in isn’t the worst idea in the world. I’m partial the the FLIRC cases myself and that is what I use for all my boxes.

Regarding Disney+ do some searching on Kodi’s forum. Almost every add-on for Kodi has a thread dedicated to it from the dev on that site.

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Thank you so much for that.

The RPi that I was given has a FLIRC case. Awesome!

I have read a fair few posts on Kodi’s forum. I am trying to get the Disney+ add-on to install. I added the repository and downloaded the add-on, but it won’t install. I will try again tomorrow and then come back if it remains unsuccessful.

Thanks again!

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I’m not in Australia, but rather than a USB tuner, you might want to consider a network tuner. This device sits on your LAN, connects to the antenna you already have and if you choose a well-supported one, it will talk protocols that are industry standard.

I’m in the US, so we have our own standard - ATSC. Currently it is ATSCv1 and ATSCv3 is in trials. Here, I don’t know about anywhere else, Silicon Dust is the best supported Broadcast TV Network Tuner. They have a Kodi app and my Jellyfin server basically ONLY supports the HDHR models with DLNA capabilities. I think Plex Media Server is the same. Only HDHR versions are supported. I know they had a European HDHDR model and vaguely recall HDHR4-AU models at some point.

They make dual and quad tuner models. The tuners are network resources, so not just 1 computer can use them. Any device on the network that uses DLNA can access a tuner and pick a channel to watch. Recording over the DLNA streaming protocol is bonehead. I had a tiny bash script to do it, just to see if it worked. I worked so well that I used that little script for nearly a year before I decided having a channel guide and typical TV grid to choose what to record, watch, and which series I wanted a “season pass” to record.

I started with their pre-DLNA models and was completely sold after screwing around with PCI and PCIe Haupauge tuner cards.

So, DLNA is supported by lots of programs and the way it is used is to have 3 parts. A controller, a Renderer (display) and a server. These can all run on 1 computer/tablet, or different parts can run anywhere on the network. The HDHR-tuners are “DLNA Servers” they provide content. The controller connects the server to the renderer so the video/audio stream knows where to be sent and which capabilities the render can support. The Controller can be on the server or the renderer or on a different device, like a cell phone or tablet. Whatever is easiest for you.

DLNA software is generally free and built into any 10 yr old or newer “smart TV”. It is also supported by Kodi, OSMC, AppleTV, Roku, Emby, Plex, Jellyfin, whatever MSFT does, and lots and lots of other media servers.

Best of all, DLNA use can avoid the complexities of TVHeadend or leverage them. It is up to you. I’ve never used TVHeadend myself - though I did try it once.

TV tuners that connect to an antenna don’t need the internet, unless your country’s equivalent to the FCC has been bought by content sellers who want, no demand, DRM be so strong as to make the tuners unable to get the ever changing keys unless they can reach the internet. In some of the US ATSCv3 markets, the broadcasters have enabled all the DRM they can over the public airways and at this point, none of the next generation tuners are working at all. HDHR had a system ready to go 2-3 yrs ago, but then the broadcasters turned on the strong DRM with dynamic keys being changed and broke it. They basically killed the early adopters of home hardware because those tuners were already 5x the cost of the v1 generation tuners.

I’ve never tried to get Disney+ working directly with Kodi/OSMC or Jellyfin. To watch Disney+, Hulu, or other paid streaming, I gave up fighting to make Linux work (and I’m a linux guy!) perhaps in 2014 and decided that buying a commercial streaming stick just for commercial DRM streaming for $30 was the easy way to ensure a movie plan wasn’t disrupted at a very inconvenient time. The WAF will put up with only so many failures with our network/computers. In short, I may not wake up the next morning of the streaming she had her heart set on doesn’t work AND it is my fault.

We only watch 1 or 2 “Live” shows a year, so almost everything is recorded locally before we decide to watch it. This allows me to wake up daily, which is a goal I maintain, daily.

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If you have a Flex model you don’t need to use DLNA or any external services. If you pay the annual fee to Silicondust for their guide data service you only need to plug storage into the device you have the entire backend running inside one device. There is a an add-on for Kodi that integrates this into its PVR system seamlessly and it can be used simultaneous with HDHomerun app on a PC or mobile device and it shares the same schedule and recordings. Plex does not from what I have seen connect to the HDHomerun backend but instead has its own guide data and will run independently. You can have both Plex and a HDHomerun backend operating at the same time and it seems to work just fine other than you have to mind how many tuners you are tying up. If your recording or watching something through Plex that tuner is locked out of other things using it while that is happening. If your using a tuner with a HDHomerun backend it only takes up a tuner when it has to. If you are recording a show and watching it like on two devices for example, only one tuner is used.

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Just Google SatIP. You could then connect it to a TVHeadend instance on OSMC.

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Most of the world doesn’t need to pay for schedule data. It seems to be only the US and Canada that do.

Rather than pay, which would be $35/yr until I’m dead, I created a website scraper. Wish it was elegant, but it has some manual steps because I didn’t want to learn the full Selenium tool. I do use Selenium IDE, but that won’t save data to disk.

The website I scrape also changes the icon numbers, so I run a pre-scrape tool to get the current mapping of channels to CSS click-IDs for the automation and then I convert the text into an xmltv file that jellyfin can read into the TV schedule grid. Also, the schedule data is useful only for a small number of people in my area, since the channels we can receive here are different from those homes just a few miles away. Location matters when there are lots of hills between you and the broadcast towers. I suppose the scraping is technically against the ToS for the website, but since I’m not sharing the results, my moral compass doesn’t have any problems doing it. Guess I’m flawed in that way.

Jellyfin is a core part of our media center mainly because not all of our devices can view the forums provided, so we need a way to transcode on-the-fly to a video codec that the renderer can display nicely. VP9 video doesn’t play well on my renderer, so it must be transcoded either before or during playback. Using a Ryzen iGPU, the transcoding to hevc/h.265 is about 4x larger to maintain the same quality as VP9, but the transcoding runs about 6x and has ZERO impact on the CPU in the system. Most of my renderers don’t support hevc video, so h.264 is the required transcode … which the iGPU does with the same performance, just even larger file size.

With any broadcast TV solution, there are always trade-offs.

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I wasn’t trying to say that you had to pay to use the tuners on that device. I was specifically saying that if you had a flex model and you pay for their guide data service you can use the device as a standalone backend and it allows you to use the zuki HDHomerun Kodi add-on that integrates that backend into Kodi. You are paying for the guide service, but it also unlocks the backend services on the device. You can run a backend on another device using either HDHomeruns software or another, but running another machine usually isn’t exactly “free” if you count electricity and maintenance. As for the Kodi integration if you use the PVR add-on in Kodi’s repository then you get live TV and 24hrs of guide data only (if memory serves). There is no subscription cost. The zuki add-on brings recording into the add-on but it only works with an HDHomerun backend that has an active subscription. When I was setting up my system and was looking into the various options I really wasn’t all that keen on all the mucking about I was seeing people having to go though to setup and maintain their live TV service. That was a strong motivating factor for me to try the route I did and I can comfortably say that I have zero regrets. The box has been basically untouched for over a year (I think I might have installed one firmware update) and it has been rolling along with daily use throughout my house. The $3 a month I’m paying doesn’t seem so bad to me. Hell, that is half of what I had been Dish Network previously for allowing local stations to show up in the guide and be recorded on their DVR.

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I think we are both saying that HDHR stuff is pretty great and well supported by all media center software.

Most people would pay for schedule data in the US/CA, but I don’t think anywhere else in the world, that is required. The broadcasters include 7-14 days of schedule data in their broadcasts.

With Jellyfin, hooking up an HDHR network tuner is really, really, easy: Setup Guide | Jellyfin

For Kodi, https://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:HDHomeRun Also, pretty easy, at least for Live TV. The Official HDHR add-on doesn’t support recording. I suspect that calling a little script wouldn’t be hard. To record from an HDHR network device, either curl or wget can be used:

#!/bin/bash

##  Usage:
##    tv-record.sh channel duration(min) Prog_Name
##   where:
##      channel is the OTA digital 2.1, not the RF channel
##      duration is the minutes to be recorded. Do not add 'm'
##      Prog_Name - is the Title for the filename, a ch+timestamp 
##                  will be added
##  Dependencies:
##      * wget
##      * timeout
##      * HDHR tuner hardware on network (hostname or dns or IP address)
## The URL to save looks like URL=http://hdhr5:5004/auto/v2.1
## Basically, the URL is URL=http://hdhr5:5004/auto/v${channel}
CH="$1"   # digital channel 2.1, 2.2, etc...
DUR="$2"  # in minutes
TITLE="$3" # for the filename
DATE=`date "+%F-%H%M%S"`

# Set the output directory
OUTDIR="/TV/Recordings"  
WGET=/usr/bin/wget
TIMEOUT=/usr/bin/timeout

$TIMEOUT --preserve-status \
    ${DUR}m $WGET -O "$OUTDIR/$TITLE-$DATE-$CH.ts"  $URL1$CH$TRANS \
    1>/dev/null

That’s it. Add error checking if you like. Add post-processing from the MPEG2-TS streams into any other container, if you like. I find that TS is too simple to be useful, so I move the .ts files into .mkv files, which happens as quickly as a copy command works. VERY fast and the show duration in the mkv is correct, unlike the TS which doesn’t really support it.

Most people don’t want any of this hassle are are happy to pay extra one-time to have it handled. $3/month is $48/yr, which is $13 over what any consumer in the US would pay for Schedules Direct data.

I will take a look at zuki HDHomerun Kodi addon. Thanks for that pointer. I’m always looking to simplify things. https://kodi.wiki/view/HDHomeRun is the overview and Home · djp952/pvr.hdhomerundvr Wiki · GitHub is the github project page.

Electronic Program Guide (EPG) data is limited to users with a valid subscription to the SiliconDust HDHomeRun DVR Service
Ah, so that addon won’t work for my tuners that don’t support their service.

HDHR Tuners: https://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/
Looks like I can’t see what is available in Australia. Here, only three different “Flex” models are shown. which are US$110 (dual), US$150 (quad ) and US$200 (quad + 4K). All the Flex models support a DVR subscription, but they can be used without any subscripts as tuners too. My HDHR equipment is over 5 yrs old, pre-Flex as an option.

Beware

ATSC 3.0 DRM: Some ATSC 3.0 channels may be DRM encrypted and will not work

That’s the US-FCC allowing broadcasters to screw everyone in the USA through the public airways.
https://youtu.be/nClxgUunmeE explains.

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Indeed. I’m quite happy with my decision to buy a Flex 4K.

That (rounded up) $3 a month replaced a Dish network bill that was well over $70 for basic service as you had to pay not only for the programing but also DVR and local service service fees as well as equipment rentals for every additional connected TV. There is no path to convincing me that the simplicity and lack of needing maintenance I enjoy with my current setup isn’t worth a couple bucks a month. It cost me nothing over the lifetime subscription for Plex I already paid for to add the tuners there (no cost for guide data at all), but for my own uses the Kodi PVR interface is much more acceptable to use than Plex for other people I live with.

That is a hard sell to a WAF.

I’m not seeing any problems with showing correct duration in my setup that doesn’t do any conversions…

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Ugh… I’m familiar. I’m not convinced it will really be all that much of an issue though. If there becomes subscription services over the air it really isn’t much different than having the option to do so using some other type of service. I don’t see the whole of US ad supported TV getting hidden behind a paywall. Also ATSC 3.0 isn’t getting forced like the digital move was. My biggest annoyance is the forced AC4 audio BS which hopefully will get sorted out in the open source world sooner rather than later. Currently with HDHR it will send the audio back to them and they convert it during playback if your using their app but I haven’t seen them announce support for any local conversions on recordings or streams to other players so that feature is not all that useful at the moment.