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Tvheadend Personal Video Recorder back end

A project log for Bypassing TV broadcasting restrictions

A compact Tvheadend server based on a RPi3 to bypass geographical restrictions of TV broadcasting

solenoidSolenoid 04/09/2016 at 23:120 Comments

The software that manages the stream from the DVB-T dongle is Tvheadend Personal Video Recorder (PVR) back end. It's a very polished TV streaming server and recorder, with lots of options.

It allows to scan for channels, list them, obtain the schedule, record shows (even automatically) and stream in a standard format that any video player can read. Essentially an open-source TV recorder on steroids. All the management is done via a web-browser, so no special front end management software is required.

Most of the options are pretty explicit, but normally one only needs to set up the dongle, let is scan for channels, click a button and it's ready to stream.

This means that once the server is up one can connect to it without any additional software other than a standard video player like VLC. You can actually download a .m3u file and start the stream whenever you want just like an .mp4 or .avi file. I intend to use it with a media center based on Kodi.

The system does however have its limits. I tested with two streams and it started to struggle, every stream takes about 3 to 5% of CPU. Since this project is meant for personal use only it won't be an issue.

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