Tvheadend

Note: I have adjusted the subject to WSL1 rather than WSL2. WSL1 is working fine. I haven't yet got WSL2 working as there are challenges with the networking and accessing the network tuners. I will post again if I get that working.

Hi all

I thought I'd run through my very positive experience running tvheadend under WSL1. I was previously running tvheadend on Linux natively but wanted a backend running Windows. I was planning to switch to NextPVR but thought I'd give WSL a go with tvheadend first. Glad I did! I began looking at it about an hour ago and already tvheadend is up and running just as it was on native Ubuntu 20.04. I've only done about 15 minutes of testing so far but haven't found any issues.

My machine is an i3 NUC with 8Gb of memory running Windows 10 Home (latest update). Windows is installed on C: and I have a second 2Tb mechanical disk (NTFS) inside as well - this is what I use for recordings. I use a HDHomerun DVB-T network tuner. And I use Kodi as my front end.

I have previously tried running Ubuntu in VirtualBox on the same machine but the performance was poor so I gave up on that. This seems to perform a lot better and uses a lot less resources.

This is a quick run through of the process I followed in case anyone is interested:

1. Install WSL

- Open "Turn Windows features on or off"
- Tick "Windows Subsystem for Linux"
- Select OK

Reboot

2. Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

- Open the Microsoft Store
- Search for Ubuntu
- Select Get

Wait for it to download and install

The only details required when installing Ubuntu are a username and password. No other setup is required. By default this user will have sudo rights.

3. Run Ubuntu

- Open Ubuntu from the Windows Start Menu (this will open a shell window)
- Follow the standard instructions to install tvheadend - https://tvheadend.org/projects/tvheadend/wiki/AptRepositories

Once that is complete, configure tvheadend as normal. The IP address of my host Windows machine is 192.168.1.100 and I could access tvheadend at that same IP (http://192.168.1.100:9981)

Because I want to record to my D: drive (D:\Recordings) I set the recording directory to /mnt/d/Recordings (that's where WSL automatically mounted my D: drive)

That's it! As I said - still more testing to do but so far the recordings are all working fine. The dual network tuners were identified as expected and both work fine. I use the OTA guide. I've recorded two shows at once without any issues as well.

I was a little concerned about the performance of the disk (since I'm accessing my Windows file system from Linux) but so far I've not had any issues. I did a speed test (actually while tvheadend was recording a show) and got around 72Mbps. Hopefully that's quick enough not to cause any issues.

That's all I've done so far but as I said - no issues at all. I got no errors running any of the above steps.

Cheers
AJD