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Min or Recommended HW Specs for HDTV

Added by Dan Burt over 9 years ago

I used to have tvheadend on a reasonably spec'd HTPC with PCI (Express) DVB-S2 card installed. This blew up and have since tried to run it on a HP Microserver NL36, with a low profile TBS 9982 card.

The Microserver unit only seems capable of SDTV and ended up having to use custom drivers for the card I chose that needed recompiling after every kernel upgrade.

Having moved house, I am in an area that does cable services (Virgin Media in UK), so I need a DVB-C card instead. But I was also wondering what the minimum or recommended specs would be to have HDTV working well?

I have a Zotac Zbox Nano AQ01 for my Kodi (XBMC) front end. Could this be capable, with USB-based DVB-C dongle? Any clues as to its performance?

My cabling options are limited in the new house as it's rented, so whichever box is used needs to be the sole TV source for the whole house, providing an internal network IPTV stream.

Also, any recommendations for USB-based DVB-C cards? Only ever previously used PCI cards, but if I use something like the Zotac, it will need to be USB dongle.

Thanks


Replies (2)

RE: Min or Recommended HW Specs for HDTV - Added by Ulrich Buck over 9 years ago

If you are happy with the performance of Kodi (XBMC) on your Zotac Zbox Nano AQ01 it should be capable to handle Tvheadend with a USB-based DVB-C dongle in addition. Tvheadend is not very resource hungry. If you want to use your Zotac box just for Kodi I would suggest OpenELEC.

I use a Sundtek USB DVB-C stick attached to a QNAP TS-212 NAS, which is farily low end. Tvheadend is running on that NAS. I have no problems to receive live HDTV (720p and 1080i) on my KODI clients around the house, and to do recordings, even in parallel.

RE: Min or Recommended HW Specs for HDTV - Added by Prof Yaffle over 9 years ago

tvh doesn't need much; recording doesn't need much; watching HD (esp. H.264) needs more; transcoding needs even more; 4k/H.265/HEVC needs lots.

But I used to record HD streams on an Acer ION box with no problems at all, and the ION GPU could play them back just as well. It's your graphics card that'll be the weak point in terms of watching anything (live or recorded). Linux seems to like NVidia more than most others, although Intel works well enough IME.

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