Tuners and Emby on the same machine

[spearoid 3]

For non-internet Live TV I have used nothing but OTA tuners and WMC up until yesterday   

I am finally looking at leveraging my Premiere Emby subscription for live TV and recodings. I have Emby on a beast of a server with more than enough resources. But it is a VM on Hyper-V.

The dual tuner PCI card I have (AverMedia) does not support DDA, PCI-passthrough, meaning, I can't present this tuner to the VM running Emby. 

This tuner does, however, work fine on the Hyper-V host. So I installed NextPVR, and things are working fine.

My question is this.....is there an appreciable difference in performance (channel switching, buffer loading, etc) in my current configuration with Emby accessing NextPVR on a separate installation of Windows, "through the network", as opposed to finding a TV tuner that does support DDA and installing the NextPVR software on the same machine Emby is on? Or vice versa, moving Emby to the host machine where it will have direct access to the TV tuner, through the NextPVR plugin?

Probably a clearer way to ask that question, but since Emby handles the recordings of live TV, I really wanted all of this on the same machine and kind of hate the tuner being on a separate install of Windows.

I am going to investigate some virtual network settings that could possibly allow the VM and the host to have near-instant networking access to each other, but wanted to throw this question out there.

Another way to ask it is, is it far better (performance-wise) to use NextPVR and tuner hardware on the same box where the Emby server resides?

I love Emby, and found it kind of poetic (ironic?) this weekend that I was messing with a serverWMC plugin to run in Emby when 10+ years ago I was installing a "MediaBrowser" plugin to run in Windows Media Center. Have been enjoying the work you guys have done for many many years. Thank you!

[CharlieMurphy 73]

5 hours ago, spearoid said:

My question is this.....is there an appreciable difference in performance (channel switching, buffer loading, etc) in my current configuration with Emby accessing NextPVR on a separate installation of Windows, "through the network", as opposed to finding a TV tuner that does support DDA and installing the NextPVR software on the same machine Emby is on? Or vice versa, moving Emby to the host machine where it will have direct access to the TV tuner, through the NextPVR plugin?

I use TVHeadend between my Emby server and an HDHR Flex 4k. I also have the HDHR added directly in Emby as a tuner with one channel enabled just for testing. I was going to test the difference in tuning time on the same channel for you but Emby thinks the HDHR is using all of it's tuners while TVH is not having an issue at all and the HDHR interface confirms tuners are free. I still like TVH as an intermediary for reasons like this. Emby still locks up tuners so with TVH I can forcefully end the connection without restarting Emby. Emby is improving though.

[CharlieMurphy 73]

Okay I cleared all the tuners so Emby could take it's pick. Measured by hand, the time from selecting the channel to video is smaller than my margin of error with a stopwatch. 4.4 seconds through TVH and 4.6 direct to HDHR. My TVH and Emby are in separate Docker containers but nothing is in a VM. It's using the Docker networking, I'm not sure if that's as taxing as VM to host.

Edited September 26, 2022 by CharlieMurphy

[spearoid 3]

oh that's interesting, and thank you muchly for the investigative work......how is that tuner interfacing with the computer? through ethernet connection? It isn't a PCI card right? Maybe USB? That would be the next phase of wondering I have....I may ultimately just need to spin up another Emby server with one of these PCI cards installed directly and do the same thing you just did, test and measure

[CharlieMurphy 73]

Yes, the Flex 4k is Ethernet connected. I would definitely recommend testing to make sure it's improved before switching everything up. It may be worth it for a PCI tuner but I've made a lot of assumptions like that and they haven't always panned out.