[mythtv-users] Old computers hosting tuners for mythtv, is there a howto?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 4 May 2018 22:05:48 -0400, you wrote:

>
>
>> On May 4, 2018, at 9:35 PM, stuart <stuart at xnet.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Is there a howto for putting together a computer who's only job is to host 2 ATSC PCI tuner cards and making them available over the network to the mythtv back-end?
>> 
>> I have 4 old PCI ATSC turner cards and have been forced to use a mythtv back-end mother-board with only 2 full sized PCI slots.  But, I have other old computers which contain mother-boards sporting several full size PCI slots.  So, I am looking for a howto to essentially turn one of these old computers into a networked ATSC tuner box.  Essentially a "homerun" networked tuner box.
>
>Just configure it as a secondary backend.

A secondary backend is the obvious option if you just want to use the
tuners in MythTV.  Then they will be fully normal MythTV tuners and
you should be able to use them as usual.

If you also want those tuners to be available to other devices on your
network, you can install minisatip, mumudvb or TVHeadend and use that
to create network tuners out of the physical tuners.  Then MythTV can
use them as network tuners.  But there is no ability to get MythTV to
scan for channels on generic network tuners so you have to create a
.m3u file and get it to load that.  I think TVHeadend may be able to
do that for you now, so that would be the easiest option, but
TVHeadend is quite big and complicated compared to the other two
options.  On the other hand, it is also more capable and has a GUI for
configuring it.

I am hoping that MythTV v30 may have some more progress towards being
able to scan SAT>IP network tuners - that would be great.  Minisatip
and TVHeadend both can create SAT>IP network tuners for you.  Mumudvb
creates HTTP and UDP and IGMP multicast tuners.  I think TVHeadend can
do HTTP, UDP and IGMP multicast as well, but I have never tried those.

IGMP multicast is the most efficient way of using your network
bandwidth, but requires a smarter type of switch that does IGMP
snooping.  It only sends one copy of each channel around the network
and any device can access that channel.  If there are no devices
requesting a channel, it is not broadcast.

I am using minisatip with my DVB-S2 tuners and a couple of spare
DVB-T2 tuners, with MythTV directly running the main DVB-T2 tuners.
But am considering changing to using TVHeadend if it does not use too
many resources - that PC is using all of its RAM already.