Install TVHeadend in a Proxmox LXC Container running Ubuntu 16.04

TVHeadend is my favourite TV Server.

There weren’t too many battles setting up the install but there were some.

Step 1 of course is to create your “CT’. It doesn’t need much so I just gave it the following:

root@pve01:/etc/pve/lxc# cat 102.conf 
#TVHeadend
#Plex
#SABnzbd
#CouchPotato
#Sonarr
arch: amd64
cpulimit: 4
cpuunits: 4096
hostname: media
memory: 4096
net0: name=eth0,bridge=vmbr1,gw=10.69.10.1,hwaddr=00:0A:DE:01:02:10,ip=10.69.10.43/24,ip6=auto,tag=10,type=veth
onboot: 1
ostype: ubuntu
rootfs: ssdmirror:subvol-102-disk-1,size=32G
startup: order=4,up=5,down=5
swap: 4096
root@pve01:/etc/pve/lxc#

4 cores, 4 gigs of RAM/swap and a 32G disk. This is because I’ll also have Plex, SABnzbd, CouchPotato and Sonar in the same CT.

A few things tripped me up. The debian sources aren’t optimal for me, the local timezone wasn’t set, and TVH wouldn’t auto start.

After creating CT, some housekeeping:

root@media:/home/hts/.hts# cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu xenial partner
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security main restricted universe multiverse

### TVH source
deb https://dl.bintray.com/tvheadend/ubuntu stable main

Those “au” ones are much better for Australia.  You can possibly find even faster ones with this guide, although I don’t know if that works with Ubuntu. It certainly works in Debian.

The “tvheadend” source for Ubuntu is as per here:  I just go the sable branch, as I’m not after any new features and like things to not break. The stable branch is regularly updated so I don’t feel like I’m missing out.

The timezone wasn’t set so I fixed that with:

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Then I went to work with apt:

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get autoremove
apt-get install tvheadend

I started tvheadend with “service tvheadend start” and saw it all looked good. The only problem is that it doesn’t start on reboot. I traced this down with a google search to the installer being not quite compatible with systemd, but there is a fix that works fine for me (as per this bug ID: https://tvheadend.org/issues/3027)

root@media:~# systemctl enable tvheadend.service
tvheadend.service is not a native service, redirecting to systemd-sysv-install
Executing /lib/systemd/systemd-sysv-install enable tvheadend
root@media:~#

 Picons

For Australia you can get the TV icons by:

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

Then prefer picons over channel names in the settings and set the path to:

file:///usr/src/picons-australia/picon

 Migrating from another Server

I found this post to be very handy. In a nutshell:

## the "FROM" box
sudo service tvheadend stop
sudo -s
cd /home/hts/.hts
sudo tar cvfp ../tvheadend.tar tvheadend
cd /home/hts/

## the "TO" box
new box
sudo service tvheadend stop
sudo -s
cd /home/hts/.hts
sudo mv tvheadend tvheadend-backup
tar xvfp ~/tvheadend.tar

I was very glad I didn’t need to manually copy all my old settings across!