Getting setup like a real "cable provider"

Hello all,

I went through last night and setup Tvheadend to work with my OTA antenna and will soon be adding my IPTV service to it. I've got that tied into my Plex installation nicely, so I can view my channels in Plex with the LiveTVH plugin. The only problem with this is the length of time it takes to get to my channels and start watching TV.

Back when I had cable, it was nice to immediately turn on my TV and my channels were waiting for me. The news was already on, I just hit power, and bam, news. Now, I have to turn my TV on, go into the Vizio casting options, open up Plex, wait for it to load, go into my plugins, go into LiveTVH, hopefully it doesn't time out and make me have to refresh causing more waiting, and then finally choose the right channel, click it, and wait for it to load. It can sometimes take up to 5 minutes to get to viewing a stream, when before, with the luxury (is it really?) of having cable TV, I'd press power and the TV was just on.

With all of that said, is there any box out there that I can buy where it'll act as a sort of "cable box" so that it receives channels from Tvheadend, and then displays them on my TV in a way where I just power it on and flip between channels as I used to do? I've never seen anything like it, nor have I heard of it, and I definitely don't want anything ungodly expensive either.

Thanks for any info you could provide!

Replies (3)

RE: Getting setup like a real "cable provider" - Added by saen acro over 6 years ago

there is a lot of IPTV players for Smart tv's.
Why you need to put tons of extra software betwin?

RE: Getting setup like a real "cable provider" - Added by Robert Cameron over 6 years ago

Yes and no. The difference between a STB from the cable company and Tvheadend is more of the difference between the client/server model.

With the STB, the feed is going only to that box, and everything is local to it. (There are some exceptions, such as whole-home type setups, but they basically function on their own isolated MoCA network, so we'll ignore that for now.)

With Tvheadend, the feed is going to the server (Tvheadend), which then redistributes the feed to the frontends in the home. While you can technically do the same as the STB and have a channel always tuned on a frontend, that's quite a bit of network traffic.

I don't use Plex, so I can't answer on that front. However, in Kodi there is a setting for "Resume last channel on startup" or something similar, so that when Kodi starts, it will immediately start playing the last tuned channel.

If you want to replicate something like the cable company's whole-home dvr situation, that would require essentially a separate network in your home (or a partitioned vlan or similar) to isolate the TV traffic. If you go that route, you'll basically have to keep everything wired, or use a separate wireless AP as vlan traffic doesn't really work over WiFi, and if you don't use a separate AP, it'll clog your wireless bandwidth with constantly streaming TV.

RE: Getting setup like a real "cable provider" - Added by saen acro over 6 years ago

https://ss-iptv.com/
nice app work good free

Solution with your WIFI is named PowerLine

(1-3/3)

Project

General

Profile

Tvheadend