Xtreamer Ultra Xbmc TV

The XTreamer Ultra is a pretty amazing piece of kit. Essentially a fully integrated low power htpc with plenty of capability.

I spent time playing with windows 7, boxee and xbmc. Ultimately I wanted to settle for using xbmc with the the aeon skin. This provides a platform running on open elec thats fast booting, and smooth looking. Whilst I had installed windows 7 to try Windows Media centre, using the platform under windows is workable, but sluggish. So the mission was to ensure that I had full TV content listings and recordings inside xbmc.

This article deals with the setup.

I had ordered the pvr version of the Xtreamer. It came with a USB dual tuner, a MyGica T1680B. I also installed the SSD module, and instructions here related to a system booted under that using openelec.

To add TV capability you need to install the TVHEADEND addon. You can do this through the main system addons.

Following that you log on to a webbrowser and goto http://yourultrasip:9981. This allows you to configure the TVHEAD end.

After that from the Movies > Files > Add Source, add in the tvheadends htsp config, so enter : htsp://yourultrasip:9982.

You can now get TV.



Image quality shown in screenshots is poor, because I only had a mobile phone camera available, so bear that in mind.

Sourcing Decent EPG Data Inside Australia (Perth)
To add your own source, ssh onto the ultra (username: root, password: openelec), then add a file: /storage/.xbmc/addons/service.multimedia.hts-tvheadend/bin/tv_grab_file

The contents of the file were originally sourced from tv_grab_file but out of the box it wouldnt work with the tvhead end. I modifed the script, with three modifications. One was to source an xmltv feed using wget, one was to stip out the top few lines, because parsing would not work correctly with the tags at the top, and the third modification corrected an if command for the bash script engine that was running.

Here is the script:


#!/bin/bash
dflag=
vflag=
cflag=

if [ $# -lt 1 ] ; then
echo 'cat ~/.xmltv/tv_grab_file.xmltv'
#cat ~/.xmltv/tv_grab_file.xmltv
wget -qO - http://www.epg-service.tv/Perth/fta/output.xmltv | tail -n +4
exit 0
fi

for arg
do
delim=""
case "$arg" in
#translate --gnu-long-options to -g (short options)
--description) args="${args}-d ";;
--version) args="${args}-v ";;
--capabilities) args="${args}-c ";;
#pass through anything else
*) [[ "${arg:0:1}" == "-" ]] || delim="\""
args="${args}${delim}${arg}${delim} ";;
esac
done

#Reset the positional parameters to the short options
eval set -- $args

while getopts "dvc" option
do
case $option in
d) dflag=1;;
v) vflag=1;;
c) cflag=1;;
\?) printf "unknown option: -%s\n" $OPTARG
printf "Usage: %s: [--description] [--version] [--capabilities] \n" $(basename $0)
exit 2
;;
esac >&2
done

if [ "$dflag" ]
then
printf "tv_grab_epg is a modifed script by Ben Greenway file\n"
fi
if [ "$vflag" ]
then
printf "0.1\n"
fi
if [ "$cflag" ]
then
printf "baseline\n"
fi

exit 0



Using TVHeadEnd iphone client

So after pulling the content down the best way I found to manage the recording of channels was through the iphone client (search the store for tvheadend).

You can navigate to see whats on, and set the programs you want to record. Very easy and very flexible.

Unfortunatley I couldnt find an easy way to record inside xbmc (though it is easy to pause live tv). Im just perhaps missing a key press.