Tvheadend

Peter Guy wrote:

Hello, I am currently planning to put together a tv headend server for my home. I have a n54l sat doing nothing. Which would be better ? Cost wise I would be spending about the same despite which option I choose . My plans are to have quad DVB-s2 tuner with openmediavault as the Base OS

Do you think the n54l or the raspberry pi 3 would be the better solution?

I use the HP N36L here with 5 Tuners (2 USB DVB-T2, 1 DVB-S pcie, 1 dual DVB-S/DVB-T2 pcie) and it handles it all perfectly, it even just about manages to do transcoding although it does tax it quite a bit.

I've also ran Tvheadend on an Pi1 and Pi2 both handle Tvheadend fine, however don't expect miracles, the limiting factor here will be the single USB bus shared between the ports and Ethernet, the most I've streamed (with glitching) is 45mbps, so it should handle streaming 2 HD channels fine, but YMMV.

Brilliant , that's exactly what I wanted to know .

I'll repurpose the n54l and a few other bits I have lying around...

It will be a 120gb sandisk ssd , dvbsky pcie card, 3x 2TB WD REDS , and 2x 4gb corsair RAM . I knew it would out perform the pi but I like the former factor , cost to run and noise levels of pi so if it was capable that would of been a nice option.

All day long the N54L system. I love the RPis but the N54L system will be far more stable, especially when handling multiple streams.

You can also add all those hard drives easily.

I have been running TVh for several years on a broadly similar Atom based server.
performance in terms of streaming out the recordings was marred by occasionally Kodi buffering or stopping.
This was cured by a tweak of the 'nice' level for the tvheadend process. Recording from two USB tuners was fine even of up to five simultaneous recordings

Strebor

Cheers everyone , I've got the few parts on order to get the n54l back up and running. Looking forward to getting it all going, never done tv headend before but it's a hobby so I am up for the challenge