TV Headend features

Struggling to find a comprehensive feature list of what tvheadend can and can't do.

At present I have a central server with TBS DVB-S2 quad tuner card running dvblink6
Media boxes connected to 6 TVs across the house. A combination of Intel NUCs, and Droidbox T8 SEs (where space is limited behind wallmounted Tvs). All running libreelec.

This setup runs flawlessly but as dvblink is going out of support, and tvmosaic is missing a web interface I'm looking at alternatives. tvheadend is spoken highly of across the web.

The features I need & have now with dvblink are:
IPTV (http streams) and DVB-S2 sources
Ability to save and transcode recordings to a custom path including variables of the shows title etc so I can scan and import into my libraries
EPG info linked to each channel, auto updating
Ability to merge channels from different sources into 1 channel.
Wife friendly Kodi plugin, i/e no random crashes, fastforward works as expected, smooth channel changes (3-4 seconds is acceptable so long as it's consistent)
Diagnostics - ability to monitor all the streams and any errors etc
Series link recordings - automatically record all new episodes of a show.

Feature i don't have now but are becoming more and more of an issue are:
Ability to automatically scan the satellite frequencies and add/remove channels as appropriate.
Ability to automatically scan the IPTV channels and add/remove channels as appropriate.
Rewind live TV - this works with DVB link, but only if you shift back by increments. If you use the rewind feature it is temperamental at best.

Will tvheadend be a good fit for me? I think the kodi plugin is the one that worries me the most, if it crashes all the time i'd hate to have wasted all the time setting it all up.

If I can get it to automatically update the channel lists with valid sources that would be amazing, particularly the IPTV as this is constantly changing and renaming channels.

Any info or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Replies (3)

RE: TV Headend features - Added by Hiro Protagonist almost 6 years ago

I'll try to answer the ones I know about...

IPTV (http streams) and DVB-S2 sources

IPTV definitely, I don't use DVB-S2 myself, but I think so.

EPG info linked to each channel, auto updating

Qualified yes - assuming you have an EPG source for your channels, you may have to add script[s] & a cron task to import the data into TVH. There are OTA EPG grabbers for various regions, so it depends where you are. If there's no OTA grabber, you can use an external source of EPG info provided you can get it in XMLTV format.

Ability to merge channels from different sources into 1 channel

Yes

Wife friendly Kodi plugin, i/e no random crashes, fastforward works as expected, smooth channel changes (3-4 seconds is acceptable so long as it's consistent)

Yes

Series link recordings - automatically record all new episodes of a show.

Yes

Ability to automatically scan the satellite frequencies and add/remove channels as appropriate.
 Ability to automatically scan the IPTV channels and add/remove channels as appropriate.

Yes

I think the kodi plugin is the one that worries me the most, if it crashes all the time i'd hate to have wasted all the time setting it all up.

The Kodi add-on is very stable, I've never had it crash in ~ 5 years of use.

RE: TV Headend features - Added by Steve H almost 6 years ago

thanks very much mate. took the plunge over the weekend and setup a new ubuntu server 18.04 with tvheadend instead of dvblink. Also using Libreelec v8.2.5 on a gigabyte Brix n2807

On the whole it's much better so well pleased. instant rewind works! & fast forward @32x works both issues that dvblink support blamed on kodi/hardware. also the epg imports in a couple of seconds compared to 20-30s, and channel changing is ultra smooth. IPTV picture is much smoother too, streams are the same though so that's a bit odd but a pleasant surprise.

I have only 2 issues that are intermittent. when changing channel I occasionally get a blank screen and just audio, stopping and starting the stream doesn't solve it, but starting a different channel and then going back does. or once it was the opposite with picture but no audio, again changing the channel solved this, but reloading did not.

2nd issue is when coming home last night my wife tried to watch something that should have recorded and yelled at me that it hadn't as it wasn't in the recordings list on kodi. The EPG did have the little timer logo against the show so it did know it was supposed to be recorded. I played another channel and instantly it notified of the recording having started (over an hour earlier) and suddenly it was in the recordings list. Is this a thing? i/e somethings gone to sleep on tvheadend and needed to be woken up? the recording played perfectly once it was showing.

other than that, very impressed.

RE: TV Headend features - Added by Hiro Protagonist almost 6 years ago

Steve H wrote:

2nd issue is when coming home last night my wife tried to watch something that should have recorded and yelled at me that it hadn't as it wasn't in the recordings list on kodi. The EPG did have the little timer logo against the show so it did know it was supposed to be recorded. I played another channel and instantly it notified of the recording having started (over an hour earlier) and suddenly it was in the recordings list. Is this a thing? i/e somethings gone to sleep on tvheadend and needed to be woken up? the recording played perfectly once it was showing.

Can't say I've ever seen that. I have seen an issue where you go to play a recording & nothing happens, try again & it works - I eventually figured out this was because the disk the recordings were on had spun down, and asking to view the recording on Kodi would time out before the disk could spin up again. There's probably a timeout that could be tweaked for this, but I just select the recording again now I know what to expect.

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