Tvheadend Transcoding

In order to use transcoding you need TVHeadend 3.5 and enable transcoding support. TVHeadend 3.5 is an unstable version, and transcoding is still an alpha feature.

Preparing your linux machine

In order to compile tvheadend, you need to have gcc and build tools installed. This is different for every linux distro, but if you're not using one of the mainstream linux releases, then you know what you're doing.

Ubuntu

sudo aptitude install build-essential git pkg-config libssl-dev bzip2 wget libavcodec-dev

How to compile and install

# git clone https://github.com/tvheadend/tvheadend.git
# cd tvheadend
# ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-libav
# make
# sudo make install

Now you need to restart TVHeadend service. In ubuntu # service tvheadend restart, or whatever you do to start TVHeadend.

You need to go to Configuration -> General and "Enable transcoding"

Problems

However do bear in mind that transcoding is still experimental, I've received reports of memory leaks and crashes. Also, there's something wrong with channels that use AAC streams, it seems AAC passthrough isn't working.

For me, transcoding does not work at all - the stream does open but there's a lot of bugs on the transcoding side:

• no sound for aac streams, somehow "passthrough" does not work
• video is choppy / lots of artefacts
• video crashes after a few seconds
• hd video is a no go, quad core cpu does not have sufficient power to recode it (somehow)

However, if you open the stream and mux it in matroska, it seems to work fine - with VLC, using software decoding.