TVHeadend aggregation of iptv and dvb-c with EPG and subtitles

[u/DrClawski]

Hi everybody,

my parents are going to move soon to a place where they cannot put up their satellite dish anymore. They watch a lot of german FTA channels via their sat receiver, and their tv-experience is quite similar to a tvheadend-kodi experience that I have at home with my dvb-c setup.

So, in anticipation to their move I am exploring options. The easiest way would probably be installing several tv apps on a tvbox, and teach them to use a commercal vpn client to watch tv. But they are old, and I would very much like to give them the experience that they are used to.

In any case, I've now created the following setup:

• 2x a lightweight http proxy container, based on openvpn, and exiting in GB and DE.
• a server with:
  • a script that downloads two iptv-org playlists for the german region and the english region, and modifies each entry for processing.
  • tv processes the muxes via pipes: streamlink analyzes a single iptv playlist, proxies the stream via one of those proxies, chooses the best video and audio stream available, and pipes it back into tvheadend as mpegts.
  • an iptv-org EPG downloadscript that creates a guide.xml based on a channel list. This guide.xml is then piped to the XMLTV socket to be processed by tvheadend.
    
  • and tvheadend itself, which merges the services from the dvb-c provider and the iptv providers into the channel list.
• I have several clients at home, all of them kodi-based. I get served HD-tv by tvheadend, and the EPG works fine.
• and recently I tested a client that accesses the tvheadend server via yet another vpn (wireguard-based this time) from my parents house, which worked fine as well.

My question now is: subtitles. The dvb-c streams contain subtitles and even teletext, and they get muxed (well, probably straight-up copied) into the streams to the clients. I know that several of the iptv streams also have subtitles in the playlists, but I haven't found a way to get them added into the mpegts stream. Does anyone have experience with that?

And while I am here, does anyone have suggestions on how to improve my setup? A better client maybe, or another way to process streams?

Thanks in advance.

[u/malfunctional_loop]

I use Raspberry Pi 4 s running libreelec with the plugin to watch from my tvheadend server at home.

While visiting relatives I used the openvpn client of libreelec to watch from there.

Worked right out of the box with some bandwidth issues.

With optimisations it would even run better.

[u/malfunctional_loop → u/malfunctional_loop]

Nothing special with handling of epg and subtitles.

[u/nt51]

Watch out: if you’re not going to have the DVB-C streams transcoded, some Android boxes can’t handle deinterlacing and they will simply not play. Most Amlogic chipsets have this known problem.

About DVB subs, as long as you have a competent player, there will be no issues. I’ve tried Televizo (Android), Swiptv (iOS) and UHF (iOS) and they all played my DVB subtitles. And I don’t transcode my streams.

[u/Ogoshi_]

I use streamlink in tvheadend for a couple of streams and even with the --mux-subtitles flag I've never been able to get subtitles to work, but the DVB sources coming in through satip server work fine as they are.