“The manufacturing and operation of this product are great. And I especially appreciated the detailed installation instructions, which after comparing with others is actually the reason I elected to purchase from The Pi Hut as a Thank You :-).
Unfortunately, overall usability is somewhat let down by the Tvheadend back-end. It operates stably once finally installed, but its transmitter data and documentation are incomplete which presented 2 major challenges.
1: Tvheadend contains no mux data for the Isle of Man, which for this newby required a deep dive into DVB-T/T2 concepts, sourcing specs from the Internet as well as manually configuring those in Tvheadend. Quite daunting.
2. Tvheadend documentation is out-of-date and hasn't enabled me to get channel icons automatically populated. Their forum has so far not been able to plug the gap either. This is big disappointment from a user interface point of view.
However, I'm more than happy with The Pi Hut's role in this :-).”
“I am using it as a commodity, running tvheadend in kodi and it's fine, works like a charm. Apparently I can get subsets of channels on several clients at the same time, provided that they are all on the same mux/frequency range.”
“This little board has enabled me to have Live TV and Recording facilities in Plex. Easy to setup, TV was up and running in about 15 minutes out of the box. I'll be getting another one of these after Christmas so I can have more Tuners.”
“I've been testing this out to compliment my satellite streaming. Signal is much stronger than any commercial USB DVB-T adapter I've used, but please note, it is not SDR capable. It is recommended to use the dvbv5-* tools to get the most out of it. Was able to stream both BBC and ITV (HD and SD) over DVBlast with a homemade 30cm aerial from >50km from the transmitter.”
“I already use my RPi3 as a settop box (using get_iplayer), but this provides me with ability to record and stream any freeview channel, not just BBC.
Software setup was easy enough - once I had connected it properly. The hat doesn't fit in the official Pi foundation case - I got round this by using a 40-way GPIO ribbon cable. Regular channels play smoothly. HD channels can be a little stilted, so probably the ethernet on my RPi 3B is too slow for this. (I'll try again when I have a USB gigabit ethernet adaptor, which should double transfer speeds. A 3B+ would be better)”
“Using the Tvheadend software, it's a fairly simple PVR. Having said that, it does the job.
You can also stream the TV picture perfectly by using Windows Media player - I'm sure that others will also do the job just don't bother with Google Chrome.
It's a good product for a good price.”
“This TV Hat just works, no drama's even for a Luddite such as myself.
I found it easy to install, and there are plenty of useful instructional video's on the web. Great product, glad to recommend it.”
“The HD TV and SD TV reception is great but it won't pick up BBC4 HD and other channels in my area (although my TVs do). The set up is not for the novice but once set up it is great. HD programme guides don't work, but SD ones do. The streaming is great on VLC but poor on a browser. All in all, not bad, and much better than a slingbox at streaming and recording TV. I would recommend it for a bit of techy fun and a useful gadget.”
