Media Center Auto Shutdown and RTC Wakeup Based on tvheadend Recording Schedule
I created a script that runs via cron job that will power off my media center if it is not in use, but will program the real time clock (RTC) on the motherboard to wake up the system in time to run a scheduled recording, and/or to update the EPG data, and from that derive potential new or changed auto-recordings. To determine if the system is currently not in use, I
- Check if the monitor is off
- Check if any audio is playing, e.g., Spotify or KODI is playing anything
- Check if the wireless keyboard is connected
- Check if tvheadend is currently recording something
Also, the shutdown processing can be blocked by creating a flag file. If that file exists, no shutdown will happen.
The wake-up time is either the next recording time plus some allowance for boot time, or every 24 hours, whatever comes first. This makes sure that at least once a day the EPG is updated and tvheadend can update its auto-recording-schedule.
As a result, I reduce power consumption of the media center considerably.
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My Next Media Center Iteration: Intel NUC8i3BEH
My Raspberry Pi 4 based media center has some issues, which I was able to resolve by switching to an Intel NUC8i3BEH platform. I was able to make the device quiet despite of its fan, and set up everything to have live TV and PVR, a web browser, Spotify and other DRM content in a very usable and performant setup.
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Legal EPG Scraper for ARD TV Stations to Use With tvheadend External XMLTV Grabber
I wrote a Python EPG scraper for the EPG data of the German TV stations broadcast by ARD. It is legal for private use. Here I share the code and my thoughts behind it.
Le Potato Media Center & German IPTV Re-Revisited
The comment by Argus Nymus on my Media Center for German IPTV post made it clear that my approach with playlist filtering via web proxy was way too overengineered. For several reasons I needed to rebuild my media center anyhow, so it was time to simplify my approch, which I describe in some detail here.
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Media Center revisited: Libre Computer “Le Potato” plus LibreELEC
While Raspberry Pi with xbian is already a versatile media center, I’m not 100% satisfied with everything. And, with the advent of H.265/HEVC as German DVB-T2 standard, the technical requirements have outrun the current offerings of the Raspberry Foundation. So I decided to migrate my Kodi media center to brand-new Libre Computer’s Le Potato board with LibreELEC, and here are the steps to do so, starting from the xbian media center described in an earlier blog post.
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Building a Media Center for German IPTV
The Raspberry Pi with Kodi is a versatile media center. Getting it to work with German IPTV in a stable fashion is however somewhat challenging. In this post I outline the necessary steps to set up a XBian based media center, to make it usable on a rather small SD TV screen, to avoid the 30 minutes offset problem with the public German TV stations, to make the channel mappings stable and to control the media center via IR remote control.