Tvheadend

I have two near-identical PCs set up to do recording (same tuners, SSD, hard drives etc) via tvheadend and
it's a complete nightmare to keep the two tvheadend setups identically configured. It would be completely
brilliant if you had a way to export every user-configurable setting (which would include tuners, multiplexes,
channels, automatic recorder config, DVR schedule etc.) as, say, as .tar.xz file (on the assumption that
more than one config file would have be packaged up).

It might be even nicer to have a set of checkboxes to say exactly which items need to be exported.
In my case, I don't want the multiplexes/channels for a particular terrestrial tuner card saved
because my aerials are pointing to different transmitters. However, I do want my
satellite card config to be saved because they're both in the same fixed position. So ideally,
each card's config should be selectable to be exported or not.

Issues with importing to a new machine could be:

• The tvheadend version (and hence what might be saved in the export) doesn't match. Perhaps an export
  version level scheme could be created which is bumped up if the export contents change (with a warning
  or rejection if you're trying to import an export that's too old). Perhaps warn on export that it's
  strongly recommend to match the same version of tvheadend when you import back again. Even nicer might
  be to detect that the last export was either never done or only done on an older tvheadend and gently
  nag the user to do an export (e.g. if the config doesn't change for a week and the current tvheadend
  version hasn't had an export, start the nagging).

• The tuners in the new machine don't exactly match the original machine's tuners. Perhaps any that are
  mis-matched should be skipped with a warning to tell the user that the tuner doesn't match. It might be
  neat to give a list of original and new machine's cards/tuners and allow the user to pick which are to
  be to mapped to the new machine. I say "new machine" here, but it could equally be the original machine
  with some hardware change (e.g. a card added or removed).

• The new machine's recording tree might have completely different contents (or even be empty), so
  you either don't export the original completed recording list or you do some sort of scan on the
  new machine's tree to try to extract a list of recordings (e.g. reverse convert the filenames to
  get the programme title or something - or is there a catalogue file for recordings?).

The other obvious reason for an import/export is that you can wipe the original machine (or trash just
tvheandend's config files/binaries), re-install tvheadend and then load in the exported settings,
saving you a lot of config time on a re-install.