How do I turn my FreeBSD desktop into a set-top box?

[Michael B. Eichorn]

On Sat, 2015-10-17 at 22:47 +0100, Dave wrote:
> On Saturday 17 October 2015 17:04:42 Aryeh Friedman wrote:
> > Any ideas? (What hardware and stuff out the ports collection)....
> > please
> > keep hardware limited to anything available in a computer
> > superstore like
> > MicroCenter (not special order or web only)
> > 
> > I switched ISP's for the first time in 5 years and now have access
> > to cable
> > TV for the first time in 15 years (I have not owned a TV for 10
> > years).
> > So I am very new to the hardware side of the the equation but I
> > have worked
> > in streaming media so am at home on the software side.
> > 
> > So far I have hooked the HDMI and speakers up to my monitor (I need
> > to move
> > the back and forth between the sound card and the monitor
> > currently).
> > 
> > Here is the dmesg for the machine I want to set stuff up on:
> > 
> Have a look at MythTV and Kodi.
> 
> Both will install on a FreeBSD system, but both also are available as
> "images",
> ie Linux with everything already set up to "Just Work(tm)"
> 
> Personally, I have Kodi running on twp Rasperry Pis (using
> OSMC/Kodi), a couple of FreeBSD boxes and a Windows box all sharing a
> central MySQO database.  MythTV is a bit more involved with more
> options, eg seperate backend and multiple seperate frontends and IIRC
> can be a bit of a bugger to set up on FreeBSD (might have changed in
> recent years.)  MythTV seems to have better support for off-air
> recording/transcoding/advert cutting but I've not used any of that.
> 
> I don't use mine for live/off-air TV/recording but from what I've
> seen you need to be very, very careful with choice of tuners if using
> FreeBSD while Linux seems to be a bit more accommodating.  Kodi seems
> to have much better support for streaming via various add-ons,
> especially those from 3rd-party repositories (or so I'm told.  Some
> may not be entirely legal in some jurisdictions)
> 
> In particular, my non-technical wife can easily handle Kodi using her 
> tablet or smartphone as the remote with the Kodi Remote App.

I'll second those software choices. MythTV was a bear to setup but it
worked well for recording TV (I transitioned to online streaming a few
years ago). Kodi looks pretty, but I have no experiance with it.

If you are doing video capture from the cable tv service be prepared to
do research. Also know what kind of signal you are trying to record as
there are mutiple standards some cards may only support one or two.
Getting a capture device that works is a level of hard between finding
a router at the store that you can load a custom firmware on and
finding a wireless card that works on FreeBSD.

Also video storage... recorded TV files are measured in GB, be prepared
to watch & delete, have TBs of storage, or plan to transcode them.
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