Tvheadend

Eriond,

Personally I run Ubuntu Server on my NAS box, which is an AMD E350 ITX board that also runs my TVH instance. It's maybe not the lightest weight in terms of size but its not huge either (personally I run it from a 4G USB thumb drive with all data on the SATA/RAID disks).

Power consumption is mostly irrelevant in this scenario as long as the kernel has relevant features for things like disk spin down, cpu scaling etc.. it won't matter much which distro you use. It'll mostly be down to choice of hardware.

Adam

Thank you Adam,

The Ubuntu Server seems like the console-only alternative I've been looking for. Ubuntu is also one of the distros that TBS support (Fedora being the other).
Could you point me in a direction where I can find information about:
a) How to install TVHeadend once the OS is in place (from a terminal command line). I will search this forum to start with, but maybe there are other/better resources?
b) How to integrate the TBS tuner drivers into the OS.

regards,
Eriond

TBS drivers are generally a PITA to integrate into anything I should know as I have a TBS6981 myself. However some people have managed to create a DKMS module so that you don't get caught out by ubuntu auto updating your kernel, but I've not looked at this myself.

As for installing TVH, I would recommend using my (official) PPAs and installing from there. Currently the only one that's worth using is the beta one (3.2 proper will be released pretty soon, so the beta should be fairly stable).

Just follow the instructions here: https://launchpad.net/~adamsutton/+archive/tvheadend-beta

Adam

Thanks again,

I read through the PPA instructions, and it seemed straightforward. I will give it a shot when I get back to my machine on Monday (Its currently at work where I have greater resources).

The DKMS stuff is not as clear to me, but I will keep on reading and try to share any findings I do.

/Eriond

I would recommend starting with a "minimal" Ubuntu:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD

It installs as small an Ubuntu as possible. My own tvheadend installation which is based on that takes up just under 1 GB.

Notice at the end of the installation it allows you to choose a lot of things to install, just ignore that. After reboot, apt-get install ssh and you are in business.

Villy and/or Adam,

Could you explain the differences between a minimal and server installation.
In particular, would the minimal install have fewer services (background processes) active, and thereby cause less load?

I've been reading a lot about DKMS, and I will give it a try, although I would feel a lot more comfortable with a step-by-step instruction. But what the heck, "what could possibly go wrong?"

/Eriond

Could you explain the differences between a minimal and server installation.
In particular, would the minimal install have fewer services (background processes) active, and thereby cause less load?

That's exactly the difference. But in either case you are not going to be loading that machine at all.

I have a intel atom 330, 2 GB ram. That doubles an XBMC machine + tvheadend + dvhdhomerun. I've had it recording 4 HD streams while watching a HD movie on XBMC - without any trouble what so ever.

This is a picture of my setup. On the left you see the XBMC frontend mobo, an Intel DH61AG. It will probably run a windows-based XBMC.
On the right, partly covered by the dual tuner board, is the Intel DN2800MT dual-Atom board, which will run the TVHeadend server. A nice feature is the SSD with both read and write speeds in exess of 500MB/s. Unfortunately the mobo doesn't keep up
Both boards have built-in PSUs, so all they need is an external 19VDC input.

The case is a silverstone ML02MX with a built-in iMon LCD and remote control.

PS. You'll have to edit the downloaded filename before You're able to open it. For some reason there are apostrophes pre- and appended to the filename...