Comment by someperson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by someperson | Hacker News Reader

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I'm moving to a new country soon, and I've been considering setting up multiple DVB-T receivers to a low power computer to record all free-to-air channels simultaneously into a multiday looped buffer, to make available to myself over the internet. Where I live, the local free-to-air channels rarely have YouTube live streams, and when they do they only have around 12 hours of history at a measly 480p.

I have a bunch of those cheap RTL2832U USB receivers from a decade ago. I've played with Tvheadend before and the way DVB-T works is multiple channels are placed on a single multiplex, so you only actually need 5 tuners to receive 30 channels.

Traditional platter-style hard drives are cheap and well suited to such workloads too: so-called surveillance drives used for looping multiple days of security camera footage are available in 10+ terabyte capacities. I may re-encode given most broadcast TV where I live is broadcast in MPEG2 (used in DVDs) rather than better codecs like H.264 (used in Blu-Rays).

Anyone else do anything similar?

I use tvheadend on a box with both ATSC and DVB-S2 cards to watch c-band and OTA tv. Tvheadend supports transcoding both on CPU and with NVENC. Highly recommended.

> I've played with Tvheadend before and the way DVB-T works is multiple channels are placed on a single multiplex, so you only actually need 5 tuners to receive 30 channels.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but this sounds like it'll be different per channel/network. For example here in the UK, the BBC airs multiple channels through one multiplex stream, so if you have 1 tuner, you can watch all the channels in the same mux. But one mux can have more or fewer channels than another mux.

When I moved from the Netherlands to the UK, it was what I wanted to do, though I was young and didn't have much besides an idea. So I quickly gave up on it.

I suppose the question is why do you need to have it looped, why not just set up TVHeadend accordingly, and stream it, then through kodi or an alternative, simply use it as a cloud set top box.

This is how I've been using our FTA channels in the UK. I've got a tuner that receives the channels, and tvheadend that streams it to my TV, where I can record, or simply watch each channel.

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