Nobody watches TV these days … except for the Bold and the Beautiful. I find this surprising since I don’t think the story line has changed in 38 years.
I have had a Fetch TV box for a few years for watching B&B but I recently noted that there was an imminent price increase so I cancelled my subscription. This was a mistake. The ability to record and pause || play are essential features for watching B&B.
I am therefore looking for an alternative. Back in the day MythTV was the go but it does not look like it is actively maintained. The alternative suggested is TVheadend. There are various options for installation (including Docker and QNAP in my case).
I wondered if I could rescue the parts from the Fetch box for a TVheadend installation but reddit was pessimistic about this.
Do any HLBers have any experience or suggestions for running a DIY set top box?
My Gen1 Fetch TV box went to e-waste recently. It was long EOL and had not worked with Fetch for a long time. I feel your pain!
Tvheadend is great, and you’ll have an easy win paired with one or more USB RTL2832s. I briefly touched on it several weeks ago in this thread. It’s a really easy install, even without Docker. No idea how it would go running on a NAS, but you may find that you need a bit of CPU/GPU grunt to record/timeshift/transcode the MPEG4 TS coming in OTA, especially if you’re decoding multiple streams simultaneously. Some others might have some more hard and fast numbers on the actual requirements, but if you’re recycling existing hardware the best thing is just to try it and see if it works.
I’m not sure what is inside a more modern Fetch TV box, but the Gen 1 certainly wasn’t standard PC hardware (other than the hard drive, which I salvaged for the parts bin), so I doubt that’s a realistic pathway other than building new guts into the case.
It’s been a long time since I’ve run Tvheadend “in production” (so to speak), but if I were approaching it today I’d find something to do the HMI/front end - maybe LibreELEC/Kodi on a Raspberry Pi or equivalent… maybe an app if you’re in the Android TV/Google TV universe (again, Kodi seems like a good fit doing a quick scan of the Google Play store) and something beefy elsewhere to do the OTA reception/recording/transcoding as required (maybe your NAS would be a good fit there?)
I suspect that any sort of smart-ish TV now days will run Kodi (a quick search for webOS + Kodi threw up this article suggesting that it’ll run on webOS devices too) so Kodi frontend directly on the TV + Tvheadend backend on another device might be an easier win than trying to DIY a STB.
A mate of mine has been an avid MythTV user for at least ten years. I would have assumed that it had faded into obscurity to, but he mentioned the other day that it’s still a big part of his household’s solution.
I’ve seen Plex offer links on it’s UI for live tv. That typically contains streaming stuff in my experience, but I asked ChatGPT anyway. Apparently with a USB dongle you can use Plex as a PVR.
I haven’t watched free to air for a long time now. I guess I’m just not much of a bold fan.
Good point. @zeeclor if you’re already using Jellyfin/Plex/something similar at home, it might be even more straightforward. There’s a reasonable chance that those services will have a plugin for Tvheadend/MythTV/something else and you can integrate the live TV/PVR functionality into something you’re already using for other media.
By the look of the docs, you might even get away without transcoding the MPEG-4 TS (H.264) depending on what clients you’re using Jellyfin with as well.
If that’s the case, something as low powered as the Wyse 3040 I was using in the other thread (or Raspberry Pi, or old spare PC) with one or more USB TV tuners might be enough to run Tvheadend despite the low CPU/GPU power. If it doesn’t need to transcode and is only pulling the data off the OTA broadcast and saving it to disk and/or pushing it to the network, you may not need much grunt on the Tvheadend side at all.
