“I purchased this HAT mainly because I didn't have the facility on my Freeview HD TV to pause, rewind or record, so I thought I would give this new TV HAT a go.
I honestly wasn't expecting it to be anywhere near as good as it's turned out to be. It was so simple to setup on my Pi 3B+, I was up and running, streaming to KODI on 2 other Pi's in no time at all.
The biggest surprise for me has been the quality of the TV picture. I am lucky as I live close to the Winter Hill transmitter. I never have issues with signal strength on the built in tuner on my Freeview HD TV.
The HD on the TVs tuner is crisp and bright but the SD TV has always a little blurred with soft, fluffy edges. By comparison the SD on the Pi HAT is much sharper and cleaner. It's almost as good as the TV's HD! I am really not exaggerating here. The HD on the Pi HAT is tremendous. It put's the inbuilt TVs HD to shame. It's made me realise just how good Freeview HD is, considering it is subscription free. There is also the added bonus of being able to pause and rewind TV and to schedule recordings.
I can't recommend this HAT highly enough. It's a very reasonable price, I am tempted to buy another, to have the facility to record two things at the same time.
The only small downside was that the connector for the aerial socket popped out a couple of times. I managed to fix this by shortening the aerial to the pi, so there was less strain.
I take my HAT off to the Pi Foundation for adding another dimension to the Pi. What other little surprises like this one are round the corner? I can't wait!”
“Having only one aerial into the house in the living room I was looking at an IPTV solution to have Freeview in every room. So I have paired up the TV hat with an old Pi 2 and use tvheadend software and an aerial splitter next to my TV. Construction was a doddle and the steps in the guide for installing tvheadend worked first time. tvheadend has one issue, the muxes information (UHF channel numbers and frequencies) for my local transmitter was way out of date (they are being moved to make way for 5G), but a visit to http://www.digitaluk.co.uk provided an up to date list. For the client end I used VLC on my Windows PC, but their Android version is a bit limited so I downloaded and used an app called simply IPTV which works great on my Asus Tablet and Galaxy S8 phone. All in all a 2-3 hour project but I now have Freeview available everywhere in the house. It's a great use for a Pi and I've recommended this solution to others.”
“Really pleased with this. I use Tvheadend running on a Raspberry Pi as my sole source of TV in the house. I used to use a USB tuner which used to frequently overhead and stop working. I've had no issues with this one at all - well worth the money.”
“Works great. I use it mainly as a DVR. Just be careful - don't do what I did and try to run it without the spacers in there...if you do, when you push the two boards together the the antenna connector will snap your micro SD card! Oops.”
“I can honestly say that this is the easiest project I have ever had to set up on the Raspberry Pi. Attach it to the Pi, power up, follow the instruction and you've got broadcast TV streaming throughout your network. Love it”
