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Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

Wanna do it with a retired pc? I recommend ps3 usb tv tuners. aka "Play TV" plentiful on second hand sights. Each has 2 tuners in it. Do you even need 2 of these devices to get 4? Ever had a 3rd thing to record or watch simultaneously? Might as well, they are very cheap.

xbmc with the myth plugin on the frontend is great if you own the thing that drives your tv screen. If you use appletv it seems you don't own it and can't run xbmc or mythtv frontend on it. But you can pay apple a sub and then also pay again for anything you might want to watch out of their stunningly limited selection. That's always apple's solution: Pay apple more to get something that isn't what you wanted...

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This made me want to pick one up to but I see it doesn't support DVB-T2, so no use for UK Freeview HD channels.

Sucks to be in the uk where you have to deal with such "progress" to see a service run by a branch of the government that literally collects its own tax and knows what is good for you and you do not.

Wikipedia suggests playtv works fine for standard def but not high def if you care. Maybe it's not the tuner for you? Make sure you choose one with mainline kernel driver support if you look for another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_terrestrial_television...

Weird rant. Dvb standard are handled by itc/ofcom in the UK, but isn't handling of the radio spectrum handled by government everywhere? FCC handle dvb in the US, no?

a) First I heard of it but apparently in the UK Dvb standard has "improved" making a bunch of hardware less useful. I comment that this is sub-optimal.

b) The majority of the content on free-to-air tv is the BBC. Who levy their own taxation. This is unique and provides the BBC with a massive amount of power to influence anything they want. One would hope they attempt to do it in the interests of the British public and the world in general. [1] See (a) for how that worked out?

[1] Between examples like Saville, WMD, and the current lunatic state of both labour and conservative parties perhaps the BBC isn't really going as well as the public might like for what they pay in additional tax known as the "license fee?" But of course most of the public didn't attend oxbridge so their opinions scarcely matter to the BBC? Now here's Stephen Fry. (And I quite like him, and even many of his performing "friends" but he's hardly representative of anyone much and that seems to be a relatively persistent problem).

fwiw, Xbox One Digital TV Tuners and some RTL-SDRs (with an extra decoder chip) are able to pick up DVB-T2 and are usually £10~20 on eBay.

https://tvheadend.org/ can be useful for interfacing with the tuners over USB and exposing web streams.

Thanks for the info!

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