Tvheadend

Hi all,

I am currently looking at purchasing a Wandboard Quad [http://www.wandboard.org/index.php/details] with the aim of building a single-box HTPC/PVR. This system would have TVHeadend as the backend and XBMC-pvr code as the frontend, all hosted together on the single box. Streams would be MPEG2 coming from DVB-T. I'd be looking at using a dual tuner with hardware PID filtering. Transcoding is not a strict requirement.

I'm aware of that many people have ARM-based TVHeadend setups using the Raspberry Pi [eg, https://tvheadend.org/issues/1018] . However, as far as I can tell, these systems all only host either the frontend or the backend, but never both - that hardware simply doesn't have the grunt required.

The Wandboard Quad is a SoC based on the Freescale i.MX6Q (quad core Cortex A9) with 2GB DDR3 and Vivante GC2000 (MPEG2 hardware decode, H.264 hardware encode/decode). There are now several ARM dev boards based on this same SoC, with the Wandboard the most appealing from a price perspective.

I'm happy to get involved in the work required to get OS support, driver support, and compiled binaries up to scratch for TVHeadend, XBMC, and associated packages on the Wandboard. However, before I start down this path, I'm keen for some some sage advice from those around here on how realistic my goals may be. If i.MX6Q -based hardware is simply not likely to be sufficient to run the backend and frontend together, I'll target my energies towards another platform instead.

Does anyone have some insight they could offer?

T.