Monthly Archives: May 2015

Getting Tvheadend Picons to Work in Plex

Picons are handy if you are using the Plex Tvheadend channel and you want the TV station icons to show up.

I was able to pull down all the Australian TV icons online from Beyonwiz (this is for my Ubuntu Linux Tvheadend server):

apt-get install git
cd /usr/src
git clone https://bitbucket.org/beyonwiz/picons-australia.git

 

Then you can set the Tvheadend (TVH) server “Configuration -> General” tab to prefer picons over channel name, and set the path to file:///usr/src/picons-australia/picon

The other thing you need to do is under “Configuration -> Access Entries”, add a new entry with the following:

Enabled: tick
Username: *
Password: *
Network prefix:  The IP address of your Plex server or Kodi player, or even local subnet if you want. e.g. "10.1.0.45/32" or "10.1.0.0/24" (or "127.0.0.1/32" if Plex and TVH are on the same box).
Streaming: tick

That should be enough access to get the icons working.

When I get time I’ll see if I can feed Kodi the picons in a similar way, as I prefer this server-side method of delivering TV channel icons, rather than client-side. For now I just point Kodi to a local directory with PNG images named the same as the channel names, which seems to work fine.

The only issue with my current picon set-up for the Plex Tvheadend Channel, and it is a minor one, is that the picons get truncated on my iPhone as they aren’t square format. They do look look fine on the PC though. I’m tossing up whether it’s worth my time to create square icons for the 22 stations I make use of in Melbourne Australia.

Other than that, I’m pretty stoked with being able to get the icons/picons to display!

Installing Tvheadend on Ubuntu

Update April 2016: You don’t have to build your own Ubuntu packages any more, as they are maintained here.

I’ve chosen to install Tvheadend (TVH) on a vanilla Ubuntu Server 14.04.2 installation. Incidentally I have Ubuntu (64-bit version) setup on a ESXi 6.0 host. Here’s how you can do it to:

Install Ubuntu Server 14.04.2

I recommend installing these at install time:

ssh server
samba server

Otherwise don’t install them straight up, but later once in the CLI you can do this:

apt-get install ssh
apt-get install samba

If the timezone is somehow messed up you can:

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

In Ubuntu, you don’t log on as root or set the root password, but rather sudo -i, which will get you root privs.

Finalise the install:

sudo -i
rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
reboot

Install Required Libraries

apt-get install build-essential git pkg-config libssl-dev bzip2 wget
apt-get install libavahi-client-dev zlib1g-dev libavcodec-dev
apt-get install libavutil-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev
apt-get install libcurl4-gnutls-dev liburiparser-dev
apt-get install debhelper

Install Tvheadend

Go to your building area:

cd /usr/src/

Get a snapshot of the latest TVH:

git clone https://github.com/tvheadend/tvheadend.git

This will install the latest development code branch. At the moment this is 4.1. If you want to install the stable 4.0 branch then try this:

git clone --branch release/4.0 https://github.com/tvheadend/tvheadend.git

Now change into the “tvheadend” directory and list the build optons:

cd tvheadend/
./configure --help

Build it with hdhomerun support, and some other goodies required for transcoding:

AUTOBUILD_CONFIGURE_EXTRA=" --enable-hdhomerun_client --enable-avahi --enable-hdhomerun_static --enable-libffmpeg_static" ./Autobuild.sh -t precise-amd64

This should create a tvheadend deb package a level up, which you can now install using the distro’s install tool “dpkg”:

cd ..
# dpkg -i tvheadend_<your freshly created package>.deb
# e.g.
dpkg -i tvheadend_4.0.7-11~g398e4fe~precise_amd64.deb

Now run it:

service tvheadend start

You should be able to browse to your TVH server on port 9981. eg. http://10.69.10.42:9981/

login is tvhadmin/tvhadmin.   You can update that once you’re in. Enjoy.

Keeping TVH Up to Date

Go into the /usr/src/tvheadend directory and run git pull .  After that, do a build just as you would before, and install the new deb package which will update TVH.  Simples! You should still have the previous deb package if anything mucks up, and you can apt-get remove tvheadend the current version, and then re-install the older version.

You can keep the base system up to date with:

apt-get upgrade
apt-get autoremove

 

Tvheadend vs MythTV for Kodi – TVH the Clear Winner

As you can see from my previous blogs, I’ve been playing around with MythTV of late, as a backend TV server for Kodi.  Even though I was successful in setting this up, I’ve hit some frustrating limitations and have so decided to pull the pin on that experiment, and go back to Tvheadend (TVH for short). My major annoyances are/were:

  • I couldn’t find a way to split DVB-T TV and DVB-T radio stations, the way TVH does in Kodi. With MythTV, they all appear as TV stations.
  • The ability to set channel groups seems to be lacking in MythTV.

I was looking further and further into these issues and there was some talk in some forum somewhere about being able to do these things with SQL commands in MySQL, but I figured I didn’t want to waste any more time – I’d invested far too much already! In TVH it *just works*.  Other gripes with MythTV include:

  • Since Myth’s both a front-end and back-end, there are often parts of config that relate to the front-end that I’ll never touch, so it’s a bit confused when you’re only using the backend. This is especially apparent with some iPhone apps I bought, where some screens of the app are for the backend server, and some for the frontend. The benefit of TVH is that it is a pure server – there is none of this confusion of backend vs frontend!
  • It’s pretty fiddly just to get the MythTV server running. You also have to jump through a lot of hoops to get the mythweb webserver going as well. Say goodbye to a weekend!

A fairer comparison is MythBuntu vs TVH-Ubuntu, rather than MythTV-FreeBSD.  I’ve tried MythBuntu, and set-up is a bit easier than all that work I did on FreeBSD, but it’s still kludgy to my mind, and still suffers from my major gripes with it.

I have found it to be actually quite straightforward to install TVH from a vanilla Ubuntu install, and to keep it up to date with Git pulls. I’ll add a blog post soon to show how this is done. My ideal setup would be for TVH to stabilise and add native HDHomeRun support for FreeBSD (the way MythTV manages to do!), and then have the FreeBSD people update the Ports collection with this stable code. Hopefully TVH will get there in the next year or two. Then I could run TVH on my FreeNAS/FreeBSD box, and shut down my separate Linux server.