What?
A really, really simple PVR (Personal Video Recorder) system which only supports the HDHomeRun network tuners. It's written by programmers, for programmers. If you don't want to hack it, but just want a solid PVR system, no worries: It's dead-simple to use.
SimplePVR does not contain its own player, but currently provides an XBMC plug-in and some half-hearted browser playback. Apart from that, all recordings are stored in a simple directory structure, so that you can just point your favorite player to the recordings.
Why?
MythTV stopped working for me and my HDHomeRun box in the 0.25 release. And even though MythTV has loads of merits, I just have no idea what to do when it stops working - I am not in control of my media center.
During the last couple of years, I have spent a substantial amount of time on bugs that suddenly appeared in MythTV and suddenly went away. I really don't like using systems this brittle.
So I wanted to create a really simple PVR, making it possible for others to hack away and have fun while recording TV shows for the rest of the family.
It's based on the HDHomeRun command-line utility, which means it's:
- built on something that's officially supported by SiliconDust (the makers of HDHomeRun).
- really simple.
- limited to supporting HDHomeRun tuners.
Setup
I started doing a back-end in Ruby, but Flemming, a friend and former colleague, thought it would be nice to do a Python implementation. So we're embracing several back-end implementations. Choose the one you like:
- Ruby back-end: https://github.com/olefriis/simplepvr-backend-ruby
- Python back-end: https://github.com/olefriis/simplepvr/tree/master/python
Please look in the respective repositories to see how to install and operate them.
There is currently only one front-end-implementation:
- XBMC plug-in: https://github.com/olefriis/simplepvr-frontend-xbmc
You can use any player that can play plain files, such as VLC, MythTV, Plex, even XBMC without the plug-in. The plug-in just gives a better experience. If you want to write a plug-in for another player, please don't hesitate, and please let us know!!