A Breakdown of Kodi LiveTV PVR Backends for FreeNAS

I use the awesome open source Kodi media centre for all my movies and TV shows, so it’s only natural that I use it as a live TV frontend. Since I already have an equally awesome FreeNAS NAS, then it makes sense to see if I can utilise its “Jails” functionality to run the live TV / PVR backend, instead of utilising a separate box. It makes sense – the NAS has a grunty CPU; teamed 1Gig Ethernet links; 16Gig of RAM; loads of storage space for recording TV, and is always on – so it’s the perfect candidate, so long as I can get the backend software to run!

This page currently lists four backends for Linux:  TVheadendMythTVVDR and DVBLink.  Out of those four, only the first three are possible under FreeBSD, as DVBLink is commercial software with only binary code downloads for Linux (among others), but not FreeBSD. The others have downloadable source code which can be compiled on FreeBSD. Discussing them further:

Tvheadend

Tvheadend (aka “TVH”) is basically the unofficial TV backend for Kodi. One distribution – OpenELEC – even includes the server in it’s distribution (although SoC systems like RaspberryPi miss out). I was actually using the inbuilt TVH server in OpenELEC before going to a RaspberryPi2 front end, which cut down noise in my lounge room by not having to run a PC with fan near my TV.

On their currently out-of-date website they say “With the integration of PVR functionality into XBMC [kodi], this has now become possibly the most popular TVH client. Indeed much of the recent development of HTSP has been focused on improving integration with XBMC [kodi].

Although the TVH devs don’t much update the website, the actual code is coming along in leaps and bounds with a lot of active development over at GitHub. From what I can gather here, this code was at version 3.4 when one developer by the name of Adam Sutton did a lot of work up till that point, but with a young family he found it hard to continue to commit to the project. That branch is currently known as the “stable” branch. Thankfully another team of devs lead by Andreas Öman came to the fore, and the project was fully opened up as an open source project, and the current code being updated to 3.9.x and is deemed the “unstable” branch. Still this is the branch that you want to be using as it has the transcoding, timeshifting (pause/rewind live TV) and other goodies, and it’s what you’ll get from Github.

Hopefully the 3.9 branch stabilises into 4.0 soon, and FreeBSD ports update their code, and the iPhone TvhClient gets updated as well so it supports all the 3.9 features like transcoding. This does seem to be the backend for Kodi users to watch in the future.

The problem main problem with Tvheadend on FreeBSD is seemingly no support for the SiliconDust HDHomeRun. According to this page, the way TVH supports HDHomeRun is with a Linux “dvbhdhomerun” driver, which only works on Linux as far as I’m aware. This really is a deal-breaker for me, as the HDHomeRun is what I use, and FreeBSD/FreeNAS is my preferred server platform. I really hope they can find some other way to support HDHomeRun on the *BSD’s.

MythTV

This one has been around for years, and has the most tedious set-up process, although is arguably the most flexible. On a generic server or ESXi, you can install the MythBuntu distribution, which makes install a lot easier, but on FreeBSD in a headless server, there’s a lot more heavy lifting.

I recommend setting up a MythTV jail, even if you have Tvheadend installed, and see which one works best for you.  The good thing about the FreeBSD jails in FreeNAS is that you can set them up without stepping on each other’s toes, and it’s a fun tech exercise. The only thing with MythTV is that it engages all the HDHomeRun tuners at all times even when not watching TV, so you’ll need to shut that jail if you’ve got a Tvheadend jail running and are trying that out. Tvheadend is a lot friendlier in this regard – it only uses a HDHomeRun tuner when it needs one, so most of the time it’s either using none or one tuner, and only using more than one tuner if you’re watching live TV on one mux, and recording on another mux (or recording two shows simultaneously on two different muxes).

VDR

Well I can’t say I’ve actually used this for Kodi. I’ve stayed away mostly because of what I perceive as limited support for the HDHhomeRun network TV tuner. A web search for “VDR HDHomeRun” shows up http://www.fepg.org/hdhomerun/. This isn’t very confidence-inspiring because if you look at the history, it shows it’s at version 0.0.1 last updated five years ago in 2010! Yes I think I’ll give this one a miss for now.

Summary

If it wasn’t for wanting to use the HDHomeRun I’d probably use Tvheadend for its ease of use, but since I do, my only choice is to use MythTV as a TV/PVR backend for Kodi. I’ll put together an install guide on my blog for MythTV, and also add some info into my wiki.

3 comments

  1. I thought openelec comes with VDR installed and enabled.. or at least used to… what about DVBLink?

    I’ve been thinking of ditching my android box for one that runs LibreElec (WeTek?), just for the PVR and network streaming (like slingbox) features… but if Kodi on Android runs fine, and all the pvr add-ons can run on Kodi, what prevents pvr on android?
    http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=270385

    Also any thoughts of MediaPortal , plex or emby for pvr use?

    1. The last time I looked at OpenELEC, it had most of the PVR *clients* installed, and had the TVHeadend *server* installable if it was on x86 / x64 architecture (not on RPi2). I doublt it would have any of the other servers installed like VDR and DVBLink. I link Linux servers and prefer servers that run on that, and TVHeadend is wonderful for that. Not sure about VDR or DVBLink beyond what I have written in the blog sorry.
      As for Android – it should have all the PVR clients under Android, but I doubt it would have any of the PVR servers.
      I have only used Plex out of those you mentioned but I only use it for downloaded/ripped content and not PVR. I have used it for live TV playing on the road though, as it has a TVHeadend plugin that you can install.

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