Tvheadend

Many of you are probably aware of the message I put out last month regarding the state of the project. Whether it was a happy coincidence or was spurred on by the announcement there has been some increased input into the project and I thank people for that. Let's just hope I can find the time to keep up with the reviewing of submitted code! Or persuade people to join the core team!

One topic that was raised in response to my announcement was that of licensing, and specifically the limitations that the GPLv3 license could have on potential commercial input. Now this is something that was not new to me, and indeed when I first discussed with Andreas opening the project up to the community we did discuss the topic and the relative merits. But at the time it was deemed too much effort to investigate further,

However things have changed since then and we've decided that we are going to push ahead with various efforts that could help put the project on a better footing going forward. In response to this we're doing 2 key things:

1. We're setting up a UK company, Tvheadend Foundation CIC. The CIC stands for Community Interest Company. It's a not-for-profit structure, that's somewhat similar to a charity, but with slightly less regulation. Really the project isn't necessarily big enough to warrant forming such an entity, however to properly handle the licensing changes we are planning, it's an unfortunate side effect.

2. We're going to be asking all contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement. This will confer on the company/project a full license to do with the software as we see fit, including potentially re-licensing (though the specifics of the CLA will carefully limit what licenses would be allowable). I have already sent out an initial email to get provisional responses on the proposal, this was very positive and most people responded in the affirmative. There are a few that have not responded and we will consider our options regarding those, but they represent a relatively small percentage of the code base.

Our initial intention is NOT to change the GPLv3 license, at least not immediately, at least one of the core team (that will also be a Director of the company) is not entirely convinced with the original proposal to re-license using GPLv2. However we've agreed on this approach as it will give us the potential to change in the future if we believe an opportunity presents itself that would provide clear benefit to the project if we were to re-license using a less restrictive license.

I will try and keep people informed and those of you that have contributed code, whether it be present in the current code base or not, expect to receive another email from me regarding signing of the new CLA.

Regards
Adam (on behalf of the Team)

Some of you have probably noticed that of late I've not been quite as active as I have in the past with Tvheadend. The truth is my work life is getting busier as I take on more responsibility and with a young family I simply cannot dedicate the time I've managed over the past 2 years (to be honest it's a surprise I've managed this much for this long).

My intention when I approach Andreas about opening up the Tvheadend code base and turning it into a fully fledged community project is that it would become exactly that. Although Tvheadend is officially a community project and several of you have commit access to the repo, most of the input over the past 12-18 months has been from me. While I really enjoy doing this, it's simply becoming too much to sustain (on my own) and the extra input I'd hoped would materialise from new users etc... has not happened.

I know there have been several PRs submitted, some of which have been extremely useful and others may have been rather badly ignored (due to my lack of time). There have been very few offers of significant input, and so far I don't think any that have been made have actually led anywhere.

I don't see this as an end, I'm still going to keep hacking. And I'm still a 100% Tvheadend household. But the level of input I'm likely to be able to put in is likely to diminish further. But I really don't want to see Tvheadend die, I think Andreas built a great system and I hope that I've been able to add some useful improvements. Personally I still think its the best route to a decent XBMC+PVR solution (and we've now got a few other clients as well).

I'm hoping this message will act as a bit of a rallying cry and that people that might have stood back up to now, in the believe that there was nothing to do or that help would not be wanted, might step forward and start looking into areas of the code that interest them. And even if you're not a proficient coder, there are always tasks that can be done, like helping with support forums, keeping on top of issues/feature requests, documentation, etc...

So let's see what happens...

Regards
Adam

As a result of being rather fed up with the poor performance of his TBS6981, particularly since upgrading to TVH 3.4, Luis Alves decided to take it upon himself to investigate.

He set about writing his own version of the drivers, based on analysis of the TBS drivers and using an existing OSS driver (with similar demod chip) as a reference. He has now completed this driver and the result of his analysis is that the TBS driver has some fundamental issues that make failures very likely.

His driver is now complete and relatively easy to install (you do still need to extract firmware from the official drivers, but instructions to do this are provided). In addition to this he's also hoping to write a driver for the 6984 which shares the same demod chip. He also hopes to get the driver submitted upstream so that it becomes a standard part of the Linux kernel. See his github wiki.

We would strongly recommend that all users of the 6980/1 switch to this driver ASAP.

For those that are interested, we have been trying to have a dialog with TBS's driver maintainer, unfortunately the results so far have not been great. You can read the current state of things on the Tvheadend blog

The Tvheadend Team

This is a patch release for the 3.4 series. It includes some important fixes for memleaks and service discovery.

We would strongly urge all 3.4 users to upgrade immediately.

Tvheadend Team

TvhClient, an iPhone app for controlling Tvheadend, has been released.

This has been written by Tvheadend user Luís Fernandes (aka zipleen). He has put some information on his blog.

I suggest that all you unfortunate folks that have been lumbered with an iOS enabled device (rather the clearly superior Android OS) download this from iTunes now!

You can also get source code from Luís' github account.

Tvheadend Team
(with a little personal bias from me )

P.S.
And while we strongly support such user developed applications, please direct your wrath at the author should there be any issues (who will of course re-direct at us should Tvheadend be to blame).

I've decided to join the 21st centry and create a twitter account for Tvheadend. I might even start using it myself!

No idea what will end up being posted, but we'll see... Anyway find at http://twitter.com/tvheadend

Adam

We're pleased to announce that Tvheadend 3.4 has now been officially released.

For details on where to get the latest packages (or source) please visit the Download page. You can also find more information about some of the changes here.

We'd like to thank all those that have helped during the beta testing. And all our users for being patient, its been a long time coming.

Tvheadend Team

TVHGuide (the official Tvheadend Android app) developed by team member John Tornblom is now in the official Play Store and can be downloaded directly from there.

Hopefully you'll all rush over there and grab yourself a copy, and then start bombarding John with plenty of feature requests (looks like my own request has already been added).

Regards
Tvheadend Team

Hopefully many of you will have already noticed that Tvheadend has moved home. Thanks to a generous Donation from a user, we now have an upgraded hosting capability, and given the recent growth in Tvheadend made the decision to migrate the project to its own domain (https://tvheadend.org).

For the most part this should not affect you guys, although some people may still be getting lost at https://www.lonelycoder.com as not everything can be auto-redirected. Should you happen to be over there and see some lost souls wandering around please do point them in the right direction!

The one thing that has changed is we will now be hosting our own apt repository (launchpad was pissing us off! We may even eventually extend to other package systems, but not yet). For more details about using the new repository please see here.

And as part of that we should (still waiting to double check, not many changes since it was setup) now have automated nightly builds to the /unstable repository for those of you that like to live on the edge.

Regards
Tvheadend Team

This is a patch release for the 3.2 series. It includes several bug fixes detected in the last few weeks, most are fairly minor however its still recommended that all users upgrade.

For more details about what has changed please read the changelog.

If you are using the official PPA you simply need run:

sudo apt-get install tvheadend

Tvheadend Team