Episode: 3475
Title: HPR3475: How I Watch Everything Using Open Source Software
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3475/hpr3475.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 00:07:06

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3475 for Friday 26th of November 2021, today's show
is entitled, How I Watch Everything Using Open Source Software, It is hosted by Minix,
and it's about 15 minutes long, and carries a clean flag. The server is, using League
Relec, coded at UNA, and Raspberry Pi to create a great media center.
Hello, this is Minix, and today I'll be talking about, uh, Watch Everything Using Open Source Software.
I got started using Cody, I believe, on an Android TV box, a cheap Android TV box
with AM Logic chipset, and with that I had a USB hard drive, external hard drive,
hooked up to the TV box, and I would just watch shows and movies from the hard drive on there.
And I wanted to upgrade, and at this time, Pine64 had come out with a Rott Pro 64,
and I liked this device because it had a PCIe slot, so you could use really fast storage
if you wanted to, or you could hook up whatever you wanted, so I bought the adapter for the Rott Pro 64,
as well as the machine, and bought a NVME drive to go with the adapter,
and that's what I used for my storage, and at this time I switched from Android to Libra Alec,
and Libra Alec is its own OS, and it's a fork of open Alec,
and its tag line is just enough OS for Cody, which is basically all it is.
There's a few open source tools, like busy box and a couple other things,
but mainly just to load Cody.
Cody is an open source application that is a fork of Xbox Media Center, XBMC,
which you used to could install on your Xbox or your PC, and it gradually became Cody,
which is what it is today.
So I installed Cody on the Rott Pro 64, and I dumped my cable subscription,
and started experimenting with over the air TV, again, which I hadn't done in years,
and I bought a TV tuner card, a hotpog, a win TV duel, I believe is what it's called,
and so you could watch one episode of a show or one program while you're recording another,
which is a pretty cool feature, and it's the same tuner I used today,
and it's basically just a USB dongle with a coax on the other end.
Now, it only enables 1080p over the air, which is fine for now,
there's not a lot of 4K OTA programming, but I've had it for several, several years now,
and it's been a great little tuner, and I can recommend it if you can find one.
So, I had the Libra Alec loaded on the Rott Pro 64,
and then I had the hotpog dual tuner plugged into USB 3,
and then I bought a nice antenna that hooks up to the tuner card via coax,
and I was able to use CODI to tune programs, and it worked very nicely.
I used a server called TV Headend, which is what I used today,
and it's a pretty amazing piece of software that integrates with CODI quite nicely.
So, what it does is it enables you to decode over the air transmissions,
and also has a built-in web server, where you can watch recorded programs,
it has a PVR, or you can watch live TV over the internet,
and I decided to proxy that through an internet proxy to the subdomain,
and so now, wherever I'm at, if I have internet service, I can watch live TV.
It works out really good, or I can watch what I've recorded.
Now, you need TV Headend server, and then you need TV Headend client.
And the client can be whatever other machine you're watching,
you have CODI installed, and like I have an Android TV in the bedroom,
or I have CODI installed, but just a TV Headend client,
and it connects to the server, VIP dress, and then a password and username,
and so I can also access all my recorded shows there, and watch live TV.
As long as you have the address of your TV Headend server,
wherever TV you want to watch TV on, or media box or whatever,
if you have a TV Headend client installed, you can dial into your server
and just watch it from your server.
So, it works out really good that way.
TV Headend also has a really nice web interface with a guide,
so you can program it to record shows in the future,
or you can program it to record all of a certain show that you like.
So, every Wednesday night, it'll start recording whatever show,
and it has a ton of features. I won't go into here,
but you can look up the documentation for TV Headend.
It's not exactly beginner friendly, it has a little bit of a learning curve,
but it's definitely worth it, and it's the best one I've found since
Myth TV back in the day on Ubuntu I was using, so yeah, it's great.
And also, there's a lot of different apps for iPhone and iOS
that connect to your TV Headend server, and you can watch Live TV that way
if you don't want to watch it through the browser.
So, that was on the Rock Pro 64, and eventually support began to wane
for the Rock Pro 64 in the Libra-Lec world, and I noticed that releases
were kind of lagging behind.
So, I switched to a Raspberry Pi 4, which is what I have now,
and the Raspberry Pi 4 is nice and that it is well supported,
so there's lots of documentation because a lot of people own it,
and so Libra-Lec really works hard to support as much as they can.
I would say downside is that you do not have access to the GPU for decoding
within Libra-Lec, so it's all on your CPU, it's all up to your CPU.
Why that is, I'm not sure I haven't really investigated it,
so I will notice sometimes watching Live TV mainly that I'll get some skipping
some frame skipping stuff like that, just because it takes a lot to decode
an HD television show over the air, and it just doesn't,
if you don't have a GPU available to do that, you're going to notice some irregularities like that.
But other than that, it's a great machine that doesn't happen with every broadcast signal,
but some of them, so just a heads up about that.
So that's how I watch TV.
It also, Cody also has different add-ons,
is what they're called for.
If you want to listen to radio, local radio,
it can access it through your wind TV tuner,
and depending on how good your antenna is,
you can pick up quite a few stations, pick up stuff from neighboring states sometimes
when the atmosphere is just right, so it's pretty cool in that way.
There's a million different add-ons for Cody,
if you've ever experimented it in the past, to probably know that.
Some of the ones I use are the TV head-in server and client,
the radio add-on, and it also has an add-on to play like retro games,
like 16 big games and stuff like that, which is kind of fun.
And then it also acts as like a media server,
so if you have shows or movies or things like that on storage,
you can watch them through Cody,
and it's pretty good about keeping up with metadata for shows and things like that,
and it connects to a TV DB, which I believe is TV database,
to pull in your metadata.
So radio, TV, PVR service is great.
Now, one thing I also do with Cody,
which is kind of a gray area, legally, I guess,
even though it's not against the law,
is I use a Dabrid service,
which a Dabrid service is basically a web hosting provider
that, how do I explain it?
I guess you could say that they are kind of an intermediary between you
and different torrent sites and different streaming sites and things like that.
So, like here is an example of how it would work.
I would install an add-on within Cody that's not in the official repo,
but you can do a web search for Cody add-ons, streaming, video, whatever,
and you'll find one of these add-ons,
and the one I'm using is, I probably don't want to say,
it's open source, though, but you can always email me if you want to know.
So, what this add-on does is connect to your Dabrid account,
and the add-on also has functionalities built into it,
where you have search functions,
so you can search for TV shows, movies, things like that,
which are also connected to the TV database.
So, basically, any movie that was ever made,
any show that it was ever aired,
you can probably find it on that.
Now, whether you'll be able to watch it or not is a whole nother story,
because it depending on how popular it was,
it may have never been saved on the internet as a torrent or a streaming file,
or something like that.
But for the most part, I found 90% of the things I want to watch.
I can find through an add-on that's connected to my Dabrid account.
There's many different Dabrid accounts.
They all range and pricing, and functionality, and things like that.
And with my particular Dabrid account, I think I paid $40 a year,
and I think I get two terabytes of storage.
Now, you can stream as much as you want.
It's unlimited streaming from the Dabrid service,
but if you say you are saving torrents to it,
and for later, then you can only get two terabytes of storage,
which is fine because I don't really save anything.
But it's also a good intermediary if you want to download a torrent,
but you don't want to get dinged by your ISP.
You can just copy and paste the torrent magnet URL
into the Dabrid service web page, and it'll download it for you.
And then you access it via HTTPS.
So the only thing your ISP would know is that you're accessing the Dabrid service.
Because it goes through HTTPS, it's just like you're accessing your bank site,
or something like that, like they wouldn't be able to see exactly what information you're accessing.
So as far as I know, it's not illegal, but it is kind of a gray area there.
Now, I do have other streaming services that I watch,
but ever since Netflix kind of focused on their own content,
it took away a lot of the cool cult shows and movies that I'm really interested in,
I guess they figure why waste bandwidth on things that majority of people don't watch.
So having access to the Dabrid service kind of fills in that gap,
especially on the cult cinema and foreign movies and things like that,
that aren't really easily accessible.
So you're not downloading any torrent to your machine,
all you're doing is streaming from the Dabrid service.
You're not holding any local data, it may be cashed,
but it goes away once you exit the ad aren't.
So you can download through the ad aren't, but I don't.
So my days of hoarding movies and TV shows on terabytes of hard disks
have been over for several years now that I've been using the Dabrid service.
So it saves a lot of storage for me,
so I like to watch lots of shows and movies and things like that.
So that is what I do to watch all my media using open source software.
So far this has worked for me for quite a few years,
and I don't see anything changing that, so that's about it.
Thanks for listening.
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