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What do people use to receive FM radio stations in TVHeadEnd?

Added by K Shea about 9 years ago

I'm just curious, is there a way to receive FM radio stations with TVHeadEnd and map them so they appear as radio stations in Kodi? I know that TVHeadEnd can receive satellite radio signals from DVB-S/S2 tuners, but I am talking about terrestrial FM radio signals such as those broadcast in North America, maybe using something like one of those cheap SDR USB tuners sold on eBay, or some other type of USB tuner.

Seems like something that should be doable, but I have never seen any instructions for doing it. I realize TVHeadEnd is primarily focused on TV reception, but there are times it might be nice to be able to pull in FM radio as well. And yes, I realize that many stations can be streamed from their web sites, but not all can be.


Replies (3)

RE: What do people use to receive FM radio stations in TVHeadEnd? - Added by Prof Yaffle about 9 years ago

There's no analogue support in tvh any more, so it can't natively see an FM tuner and do anything with it.

That said, you could look at the pipe:// support, which may allow you to re-route your FM signal via some translation layer (I presume you have some software that will listen to the stream) and then into tvh as an IP stream in .ts format. Not sure it's doable, as it's not something I've looked at, but that's the theory...

RE: What do people use to receive FM radio stations in TVHeadEnd? - Added by K Shea about 9 years ago

Well, there is so-called "HD Radio" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio) which is digital, the only problem there is that I know of no software-operated digital tuners that will bring it into a PC (something like a HDHomeRun, but for HD Radio). In fact, it looks like this technology never really caught on for anything other than automotive radio receivers.

I'm never quite sure how the pipe:// support works. I would really like to see an example of taking an audio or video stream from the Internet and using pipe:// to bring it into TVHeadend so it would be seen as a channel. Obviously it would need to be a streaming source for this to work, but the goal would be to be able to use the PVR functionality of TVHeadend to record certain types of scheduled programming, so that it can be played back later. I believe Kodi can support playing of certain types of streaming material natively, as can VLC, but neither has the ability to select and record a stream on a schedule. An example would be recording a particular program from a local NPR station for playback later in the day.

Another reason for this would be if you wanted to have multiple computers or devices playing the same stream (live or recorded), in which case TVHeadend could access the stream once and distribute it to all the other devices, in order to save bandwidth.

RE: What do people use to receive FM radio stations in TVHeadEnd? - Added by Prof Yaffle about 9 years ago

I've not tried it myself, but I think the principle is:

1. Add a new IPTV network
2. Add a new mux
3. Add the pipe:// command as the source for that mux

... where the pipe:// command points to a script or a program that takes whatever your source information is and re-wraps it into an MPEG-TS stream, as would be expected for a 'real' TV channel.

More information (somewhat opaque IMO) here:

https://tvheadend.org/projects/tvheadend/wiki/Custom_MPEG-TS_Input

https://tvheadend.org/boards/5/topics/15853?r=16535

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