Watch TV on Raspberry Pi with OpenELEC media-build

I’m using an Elgato EyeTV DTT to watch TV on my Macbook Pro. I wanted to use this USB tuner on my Rasperry Pi with Raspbian, but VLC doesn’t support hardware-accelerated video yet. So I found this post on Tiago Pires’ blog, which describes how to build OpenElec from scratch including media-build. Unfortunately, some things are missing in this post, and some others are unnecessary. A lot of things in this post comes from his article, so thank you

Media-build is just a script that will get the most up-to-date dvb drivers and include them in OpenElec. I don’t think it’s required if your DVB tuner is supported for a longtime by Linux, but let’s include it anyway.

The easy way

As I’m really kind, I built OpenELEC.tv, media-build, and tvheadend for you. Just download these files and go to the “Create SD-card” step.

• OpenELEC (commit 1355da624e) + media-build (commit 425bf0084e)
• tvheadend

The hard way – let’s build this

Create the SD-card

If you’re not coming from the build section, just download OpenElec from the top of this post, and put it in a folder. Then, open a terminal and go to this folder.

Insert your SD card, and extract the archive:

Then, it depends of what you platform is.

Linux

I’m assuming that /dev/sdb is your SDCard device:

OSX

I made a pending Pull Request on Github to handle OSX SDCard installation. As it’s not yet merged to the official OpenELEC repo, you’ll have to go here and save it to ./create_sdcard.

Then, assuming that your SDCard is /dev/disk3:

Tvheadend

Boot your RPi, you should get a beautiful XBMC interface. From your regular computer you should see an openelec shared network folder. Extract the tvheadend archive somewhere on your computer, and move the resulting folder to openelec/downloads/.

On XBMC, go to System -> Settings -> Add-ons -> Install from zip file. Then, select thz tvheadend zip file from Home/downloads/service.multimedia.hts-tvheadend/. You should get an installation confirmation message. Reboot your RPi.

When your RPi is fully started up, navigate to the following link from your computer’s browser:

Then, navigate to Configuration -> TV Adapters and select your adapter in the list. You can now configure your tuner… and watch TV !