Our family watches TV trough IPTV and via streaming services and it’s been fine enough for quite some time. However, now one of our broadcast companies got in a fight about streaming contract with our IPTV provider and we lost a few of the channels. Not that big of a deal for me personally, but apparently there’s some shows the rest of the family wants to see. This isn’t the first time and likely it won’t be the last.
However, all the free channels are available over air as well (and that’s one excuse for IPTV operators to exclude offerings, “you can watch it anyway”). We have an antenna, but previous house owners just left the cable loose at the outside wall and brough it trough a hole in window frame. I’ve removed the cable and patched the hole for it and it’d be pretty difficult to run antenna cable to our TV set cleanly. However, I could pull a new cable nearby to my server stack with reasonable effort.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve played with capture cards and any kind of streaming, so maybe hive mind here has some ideas. TV already has Android TV box connected, so anything that works with it is a bonus, but not a requirement.
So, what software (and hardware) I could use to pull video from DVB-T2 and stream that over local network?
USB tuner + Jellyfin.
You can also set up the IPTV stuff with Jellyfin (at least most likely, I haven’t tried this personally), so it’s all through one interface.
HDHomerun is the commercial solution that is relatively painless assuming you have something that can run a client that supports it
Open source, you probably want to look at tvheadend and a USB DVB-T tuner (hauppauge still make decent ones I believe) attached as the next most straightforward option, it can take a little bit to get set up but it’s pretty seamless once it is. Same caveat about clients
I use a USB tuner like https://hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_dualhd.html and https://mythtv.org/ Has to be plugged into an external antenna, and it really helps for that antenna to be on the 2nd floor, in a window, with clear view unobstructed by aluminum siding.
tvheadend.org or HDhomerun are probably more general solutions.
I use a USB tuner like https://hauppauge.com/
I did that way back in the day, tho mine was not inline USB but a PCIe card and MythTV. Worked pretty well.
Yeah, I started with a PCI (no e) card, but had to switch to USB when it got hard to find cheap motherboards with PCI slots. It’s an old setup :) Honestly amazed that they can fit the whole thing into a thumb-sized USB dongle, although I suppose it’s easier without the analog side.
Come to think about it, it may have been just a PCI card. That’s too long ago for this old head to clearly remember.
really helps for that antenna to be on the 2nd floor, in a window, with clear view unobstructed by aluminum siding.
It’s on a roof already and quite capable of receiving signal, we just haven’t used OTA broadcasts for a while as IPTV used to work good enough. So no problems with the antenna, I’m just wondering what I should plug in to that.
tv headend is what you’re looking for.
