Tvheadend

1. FireTv - I saw I can side load kodi and I got this to work. Does this have any problems or can it output from tvh HD or 4K HD?
2. Roku or Raspberry Pi 4 - Can this output in hd or 4k and actually not have a slow ui? How useable are those devices?

Kodi on a Raspberry Pi is highly usable, the earlier Pi 2 & Pi3 models work fine. A Pi4 can give you 4K & will work fine.
Don't know about the other hardware.

Software Q's:
3. Transcoding Jobs and/or transcoding - I understand it changes the format of the file, does this help me? Is this something where tvh records something and then optimizes it? Do I need to transcode coming from HDHomerun?

You might want to transcode depending on circumstances. For example if your digital TV is transmitted in MPEG-2 you might want to transcode to MP4 to save disk space. The type of tuner you use will have no impact on this. If you're happy with the format your TV is transmitted in, there's no need to transcode.

4. Is the timeshift or live tv buffer size configurable?

Yes.

5. Any problems with running inside a vm? My source would be from the network the hdhomerun.

Should not be a problem. FYI A Pi4 can run TVH with hardly any impact on CPU.

WAF Q's:
5. A movie is being recorded from 9 - 11:30, If I come home at 10:30 can I start playing the recording from the beginning while its still being recorded?

Yes.

6. Watching live tv and all other tuners are recording - A scheduled show is about to start and needs the tuner I am using to watch live tv. What happens?

Depends. If the scheduled show is on a mux used by one of the currently used tuners, the recording will work. If the recording needs a mux that is not currently tuned, and no more tuners are available, the recording will fail.

Don't know what things are like where you are, but where I live most TV is available via IPTV as well as OTA. In which case it's possible to configure the same channel on OTA and IPTV [with different priorities], and TVH will fall back to IPTV if a tuner isn't available for OTA.

7. fast forwarding, rewinding with tvh being on different server, does it work good?

No problem.

8. How snappy is menus and guides with tvh being remote?

A remote TVH doesn't impact UI performance.
I suppose it might be possible to run into performance issues if you had a guide with thousands of channels, but:
a) You'll never watch that many - better to pare it down to what you use.
b) The TVH Web interface is more usable for accessing a large EPG anyway.

Possible Setups:
A.
Load VM on hp server with tvh as backend.
Use FireTv Kodi app to access tvh
Kodi on Raspberry Pi, maybe buy another if it works good.
buy HDHomeRun Prime

You could do this, if the server is running anyway. Why a VM? Would only be necessary if the server isn't running Linux.
You could also run TVH on a Raspberry Pi that you're using for Kodi.

Just adding my 2c:

I run TVH on a separate box in the basement. It is dedicated for TVH and NFS storage for music. Would not have it any other way. I use OSMC on a Vero4K for playback and a separate Yamaha sound processor for surround. I used a 5ch sound card in the past, but I needed something that could accept multiple, optical inputs.

I pull signal from both DVB-T/T2 snd DVB-C with 4 tuner sticks.

Thank you both for your responses. My choice for the vm is only that I don't have to run additional hardware, has a lot of redundant space, easy backups, and is under utilized. Except for the redundancy and backups running on the local RPi also sounds like it would work just fine. I too will be using OSMC as well.

From what you both are saying I think I'll take the dive and buy the hdhomerun so I can use my cable card.

Thanks Again!

Just an FYI, OSMC doesn't yet fully support the Pi4, I think you can install it but hardware video decoding support isn't there yet.

According to the OSMC forums "First public release will come with [kodi]v19."

Oh good to know. If I go raspberry pi 3 b+, it only has 1gb of ram. Is that ok? Any performance problems with that? Any minimum ram I should have?

Thanks!

FWIW, I think i had a PI2 previously, but switched to the VERO4k, instead of going to a larger Pi. Incidentally does the Samsung remote we got with our new TV work directly with the Vero, but I mostly use a miniature USB wireless keyboard.

The vero4k looks really nice. I like it has a nice little remote. Though like you said maybe a usb wireless keyboard is easy to use.

Thanks Again

Yes. never use the remote I bought a small Plex-something keyboard. Easier to type stuff that way.

How it works question for ya. If I have the HDHomerun on my network with my cable card in it, tvh on my vm and an osmc box at my tv. When I watch live tv does it go though the thv backend or straight off the hdhomerun? I was guessing everything comes off the backend? HDHomerun only has 3 tuners, but I see there is ceton infinitv 6. This one would do 6 tuners but I would have to install it in the host. Any experience with that tuner card?

Thanks!

Sorry. Not familiar with Homerun or that card. I just have four sticks and will add a fifth. Note that one MUX will carry 4 channels so 6 tuners is a lot. In my case I have both DVBT and DVBC though and I need an extra one for DVBC as I obly have one there.

Brian nah wrote:

Oh good to know. If I go raspberry pi 3 b+, it only has 1gb of ram. Is that ok? Any performance problems with that? Any minimum ram I should have?

A 3b+ will work just fine.

When I watch live tv does it go though the thv backend or straight off the hdhomerun?

Live TV goes via the TVH backend.