New Setup Advice

[dcrdev 255]

I'm going to be looking at building a new server in the new year and also planning on transitioning my clients away from Kodi to the actual Emby apps. Moving away from Kodi means that I will have to use Emby's dvr capabilities directly for live tv.

 

Currently I have a dvb-t2 tuner card in my server which I use with Tvheadend on Linux - I don't use the live tv functionality much in Emby because it doesn't seem very polished with Tvheadend. I don't know if this is a symptom of using Tvheadend or me living in the UK and having poor guide information. There's very little metadata available - the only stuff that is identified are the TV movies, no TV shows have images.

 

Additionally with TVHeadend as a backend streams are taking about 30 seconds to load which is far too slow for everyday use - ontop of this no matter which stream quality you select picture quality stays the same; selecting an hd channel for instance still results in a standard definition stream - it's like the stream is not being probed correctly.

 

So my question is this - what should I go for in terms of tuner and backend that'll give me the best experience with dvb-t2? I'm thinking that hdhomerun will be the likely candidate - but could do with the opinion of anyone that lives in the UK!  

 

Thanks,

[legallink 187]

I have an HDHomerun and the experience with Live TV and Schedules Direct as an EPG is pretty good.  It's not as good as with a cable box when switching channels, but we don't really watch live tv much (and when we do, its a sports game so no channel flipping).  EPG is pretty decent with SchedulesDirect, only minor things here and there.  Flipping channels, it isn't usually 30 seconds to switch channels, but I think it can be as much as 30 seconds sometimes (and sometimes more...for instance, right now video loads up, but I'm getting no audio through Emby Theater, no video through web, but everything works a lot faster through iOS....go figure.) this was caused by the Christmas theme...go figure.  Right now, in chrome, its about a 5 second load up time per channel). So from a live tv perspective, I don't know that your experience will be a ton different.  I haven't looked into the intricacies of why it takes so much longer for a tv stream to display over any other transcoded file, but it does.  FFMPEG is running nearly immediately but display of picture is definitely delayed well beyond that.

 

From a DVR perspective, it is pretty reliable, and our issues happen once every 4 - 6 months, if at all.

 

I don't live in the UK (big caveat!)

 

(edited for solution that I didn't see before)

Edited December 21, 2016 by legallink

[dcrdev 255]

Thanks - couple of questions if you don't mind?

 

• Are there any issues with the quality of the stream i.e. does hd look noticeably better than sd and does changing the bit-rate make a difference?
• Is all the configuration done via emby or do you have to configure the hdhomerun device separately?

[legallink 187]

So, I watch typically on a 1080p plasma or on my computer. HD does look noticeably better than SD. I've never changed bit rate as I rarely watch remotely but I can only assume changing bit rate affects the quality of the stream. That being said, I'm sure there are some levels of negligible difference. On other streams below 8 mb/s ive noticed an appreciable difference in streams.

 

You have to configure the hdhomerun device separately but that takes all of thirty seconds. You just run the configuration app that silicondust distributes and it identifies all the channels and your done. After that, all you have to do is signup for and input your EPG, Emby will locate your hdhomerun automatically if it's on the same network and subnet.

 

That's pretty much it.