STB + Capture card + NextPVR + Emby

[sjevtic 0]

I've been trying to get Live TV working in Emby for the better part of the last year and have struggled without much progress.

 

At the moment, I use MediaPortal TV Server to capture the output from DirecTV set top boxes via Hauppauge Colossus cards; channel changing is done via the DirecTV SHEF plugin, while EPG data comes from the SchedulesDirect EPG Client plugin.  The solution works reasonably well for the native clients in both MediaPortal and Kodi.  It works less well for scenarios where MPExtended is involved, including WebMediaPortal and the aMPdroid app.  On Emby, which also retrieves streams from MediaPortal TV Server via MPExtended, live TV is on the verge of unusable.  You can read a bit more about my struggle here if you want.  This seems to be a consequence of the delays associated with bringing up a stream through such a complex path (i.e., capture card instead of a tuner device) and the general state of MPExtended, which has suffered greatly as a consequence of not being a part of the core MediaPortal distribution.  Despite its importance, development has languished, and the little attention it gets is now on at least two diverging paths without any central publicly available repository.

 

So, what I am wondering is if NextPVR will give me better results with the Live TV feature in Emby with this hardware configuration.  It is clear that NextPVR supports the Colossus and SchedulesDirect out of the box. NextPVR also supports the use of an arbitrary executable to implement channel changing, so I could cobble up something for just about any STB solution, whether that is DirecTV right now or something else in the future.  The NextPVR plugin for Emby forum here seems to be a lot more active than the MP plugin for Emby forum, which is also a really good sign.

 

While the activity here seems to suggest that users are having pretty good experiences with NextPVR for live TV in Emby, there has been relatively little explicit mention of capture cards being involved.  Can anyone comment on how well this works?

[sub3 64]

I don't use Emby myself, but some general comments. NextPVR works well with the Colosssus and SchedulesDirect. This device can be a little slow to start, and can be further slowed when combined with needing to run an IR Blaster. If Emby didn't like a slow start of this type of device in MediaPortal, it's probably also going to be unhappy with the device starting slowly in NextPVR too. You'd probably need to try it to know for sure though - there is a possibility something about the NextPVR sequence of events is a little more Emby friendly. 

Edited February 3, 2019 by sub3

[Luke 37064]

If the tuner is usable in next pvr then I'm guessing it will be fine in Emby via the plugin. Thanks.