FreeBSD TV

Not at this moment, no.

I did many many years ago. Back in the day of analog TV, I had a Hauppauge TV turner card in a FreeBSD system. It encoded the tv signals as .mp4 (actually it was probably .ts but in any case) that could be watched through a video player (I forget witch one) like vlc.

Now-a-days I only do it indirectly by streaming from my Plex server running on FreeBSD to my Roku box connected to my TV. The Plex server is fed TV from a Tablo device. It's far more complicated but also more flexible than the old way.
 
I was. I had an Bt848 analog card that used the bktr(4) driver. That worked surprisingly well, but this was at least 10 years ago. multimedia/webcamd supports a bunch of modern DVB cards but I'm not sure what works and what not.
 
I have a Linux (Ubuntu) bhyve running mythtv backend with a network-connected HD Home Run. Works great.

I ended up with the bhyve as the native mythtv had numerous small quirks, and I didn't have the time to chace them down or have the family upset if we missed something. The Ubuntu packages for MythTV tend to just work.
 
balanga said:
What does MYTHTV run on? And is there a FreeBSD version?
Click to expand...

https://www.mythtv.org/download

There is a port (multimedia/mythtv and multimedia/mythtv-frontend) that builds last time I tried, but as I mentioned, I ran into quirks with it. Full disclosure, I was running it as a continuation/upgrade of an initial install on Linux many years earlier (imported config database) so my experience may be unique.

Capture card compatibility will be the stickiest point, but I did get the HD HomeRun (Ethernet connected HD tuner) working, but I don't recall the specifics anymore.
 
I watch TV (sometimes) via VLC on my FreeBSD machines. VLC gets the TV channels from a tvheadend server which is connected to a HDHomeRun 4DC network tuner. Sadly, the tvheadend machine runs Linux, I was unable to get the multimedia/tvheadend port to work in FreeBSD. I haven't tested in a while, it could be that the tvheadend ports works better now.
 
I've recently bought a USB TV stick. When inserted into a system running FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE, lsusbshows
Code: 
Bus /dev/usb Device /dev/ugen0.3: ID 040d:9006  Integrated Technology Express. Inc.  IT9135 BDA Afatech DVB-T HDTV Dongle

Is there any FreeBSD pkg which can use this device?
 
Criosphinx said:
Two years ago I bought a used WinTV-HVR-1850 pcie tuner.

Since then I use it daily to watch over the air local channels with mpv
Click to expand...

Hey Criosphinx;

I also have the same card, but never got it to work. I attempted to scan with w_scan, but although it's detected, no channels are detected.

Could you post what you did to configure it?

In my /boot/loader.conf I have:
cuse4bsd_load="YES"
cx23885avfw_load="YES"
cx23885_load="YES"

In my /etc/rc.conf I have:
cx88d_enable="YES"

relevant modules from kldstat:
22 1 0xffffffff82828000 16ab cx23885.ko
23 4 0xffffffff8282a000 7334 cx88.ko
24 1 0xffffffff82832000 1a13 cx88mpegcore.ko
25 2 0xffffffff82834000 28d6 cx88audiocore.ko
26 2 0xffffffff82837000 3086 cx88videocore.ko
27 2 0xffffffff8283b000 2d1b cx23885av.ko
28 1 0xffffffff8283e000 41bb cx23885avfw.ko
29 1 0xffffffff82843000 85b9 cuse.ko

Service cx88d is successfully running.

Also, if anyone has a modern card that works out of the box that they have experience with (Ideally, USB/PCI/PCIe), I'd love to hear their experiences.
 
I did nothing special. I have the same in both loader.conf and rc.conf

With w_scan I do: w_scan -fa -M

I put the results in ~/.config/mpv/channels.conf and then I can tune with mpv dvb://"some channel"
 
tingo said:
I watch TV (sometimes) via VLC on my FreeBSD machines. VLC gets the TV channels from a tvheadend server which is connected to a HDHomeRun 4DC network tuner. Sadly, the tvheadend machine runs Linux, I was unable to get the multimedia/tvheadend port to work in FreeBSD. I haven't tested in a while, it could be that the tvheadend ports works better now.
Click to expand...

Just wondered if anyone does have multimedia/tvheadend working on FreeBSD....

According to its home https://tvheadend.org/
Tvheadend is a TV streaming server and recorder for Linux, FreeBSD and Android supporting DVB-S, DVB-S2, DVB-C, DVB-T, ATSC, ISDB-T, IPTV, SAT>IP and HDHomeRun as input sources.
Click to expand...
 
balanga said:
Just wondered if anyone does have multimedia/tvheadend working on FreeBSD....

According to its home https://tvheadend.org/
Click to expand...

Yes I have it installed and 'working'. By 'working' I mean it runs fine on FreeBSD. I however do not have a working tuner card in it. Seems the support for tuner cards in FreeBSD is sorely lacking. I wrote these folks and asked them to write native code drivers for FreeBSD and advised them to work with the ports system; they wrote back and told me they would look into it. Never heard anymore, and don't see any mention of FreeBSD on their web site. Maybe more of us should write them.

https://www.tbsdtv.com/products/tbs6704-atsc-or-clear-qam-quad-tuner-pcie-card.html

I tried to find some legit MPEG-TS IP streams but to no joy. I did get working some foreign streams, but (a) one set would only run for 15 seconds, and (b) others were simply really questionable sites. Would love to find some legit streams.

Anyway, I just purchased the Canadian version of SiliconDust HDHomeRun. I will try to integrate it with multimedia/tvheadend and/or multimedia/plexmediaserver. We only get three OTA digital channels, and this does two so that will suffice. I was really interested in trying to find an OTA satellite receiver that spit out MPEG-TS streams, but got no where. I might try again this winter; my heavy duty fishing is wrapping up, and hopefully I can find time between my home reno projects and my Juniper Networks exam studies.

Not posting this to hijack this discussion thread, but I and a few others had a chat before about this. You might find a nugget or two of info not already mentioned in here.
Thread 56045

EDIT: Back to multimedia/tvheadend, what I did not get try to get done was the building of my own TV guide. Until I get working stable usable sources what would be the point you know. Assuming all goes well with HDHomeRun I will try to get DVR functions up and running, as well as streaming to my 'remote' devices like cellphones, tablets, and my FreeBSD desktops.
 
I am back at it too. this time I have an Happauge HVR-1800 which was supported at one time via the wiki.
Looking at tvheadend it has been through some recent updating so that is good.
 
Phishfry said:
I am back at it too. this time I have an Happauge HVR-1800 which was supported at one time via the wiki.
Looking at tvheadend it has been through some recent updating so that is good.
Click to expand...

Is tvheadend something that could incorporate cccam functionality?
 
tvheadend supports OSCam at least. But - I haven't been able to make it work under FreeBSD. When my tvheadend machine runs Linux it is able to talk to my OSCam server (running on another machine) just fine. When I run tvheadend on FreeBSD, communication with the OSCam server fails. Same version of tvheadend, same configuration and the same OSCam server. Still doesn't work under FreeBSD. I've spent some time on this, but haven't figured out what the problem is.
 
So oscam and cccam are some software card readers for TV encryption schemes?
Luckily this is not required for OTA in the US.

balanga I looked up your PC express card and drew a blank. It has some similar chips as Happauge NOVA-T board but that was just one chip out of 3. Was not an Happauge rebranded card.

Just for reference I am trying on a HVR-1800 with revE1D9
The rev is a big deal on the Happauge cards. They wanton switched chips on the same models.

Criosphinx said:
Two years ago I bought a used WinTV-HVR-1850 pcie tuner.

Since then I use it daily to watch over the air local channels with mpv
Click to expand...
This is good to hear. At least it gives me hope.
 
My dead end here on HVR-1800:
Similar to freebsdinator problem but service won't start.
Seems to be lacking a /dev/dvb node as well as any /dev/cx88* devices

Code: 
root@TV:~ # kldstat
Id Refs Address            Size     Name
 1   29 0xffffffff80200000 1f67a88  kernel
 2    1 0xffffffff82169000 e690     cuse.ko
 3    1 0xffffffff82178000 4e30     cx23885avfw.ko
 4    1 0xffffffff8217d000 6888     cx23885.ko
 5    6 0xffffffff82184000 6fe0     iicbus.ko
 6    3 0xffffffff8218b000 7370     cx23885av.ko
 7    3 0xffffffff82193000 6fb8     cx88videocore.ko
 8    5 0xffffffff8219a000 e550     cx88.ko
 9    2 0xffffffff821a9000 4460     iic.ko
10    3 0xffffffff821ae000 7d10     cx88audiocore.ko
11    2 0xffffffff821b6000 4440     cx88mpegcore.ko

root@TV:~ # service cx88d start
ls: /dev/cx88mpeg*: No such file or directory

root@TV:~ # cx88
[cx88 2017-10-22 03:09:24] Error: You must specify a device (-d); Available devices:
Digital video:
   (No devices found)
Analog video:
   (No devices found)
Analog audio:
   (No devices found)
 
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