Reddit mentions of Hauppauge TV-Tuner WinTV-dualHD USB Stick DVB-C/T2/T mit FB

My hardware isn't great to be honest. I badly need a new GPU but I've just paid for a family holiday so it's going to be a while. For everything apart from the gaming side of things, pretty much any old PC should do the job. Even an old amd athlon or Intel core quad CPU should be fine - I mean, kodi runs adequately enough on shitty Chinese android boxes, raspberry pis and firesticks. You're probably better off going with something like an AMD A10-7850K APU though, unless you're looking for a decent gaming experience too, in which case you should check out /r/buildapc for help or take a look at the build guides on /r/pcmasterrace


I'm using this usb hauppage dual TV tuner I bought off amazon for around £50. It works fine. A lot of people say the usb tuners aren't as good as an internal tuner that connects to a pci-e slot on your motherboard and, while they're probably right, that particular usb tuner works well for me. Slap one of those into any old PC, connect it to an aerial with decent reception and you're golden for getting freeview in kodi. If your freeview reception is shit but you have a satellite dish, look for a dvb-s tuner rather than dvb-t. If you want the HD channels to work properly on freeview, make sure it's dvb-t2. There are cheaper options but drivers can be a real pain in the arse. The reason I went for the hauppage tuner is because I knew the drivers would work with both the mediaportal and the nextpvr backend servers. NextPVR is easy to setup and the recordings, pausing live TV etc works great. There is a slight delay flipping channels compared to using tvheadend on Linux but it works about as well for me as the inbuilt freeview tuner in my Panasonic TV.


Anyway, since you asked, my CPU is an amd fx-8350 with a slight overclock, I've got 8GB RAM, and my GPU is a quickly ageing xfx 2GB 7850. It's in a bitfenix prodigy midnight black case on a micro-atx motherboard with a coolermaster 212 evo fan. Using an ssd speeds the general operation up immensely so booting straight to kodi is fast, giving it that 'appliance' feel. Much faster at starting up than a sky box, for example. Mine is an old 60GB SSD that's barely big enough for windows and a few other applications. I've got most of my games installed on a 1TB Seagate HDD and that's what I use for tv recordings.



The case is nice enough looking and moderately compact so it doesn't take up too much space but cable management was/is a disaster. If you're planning on something for your living room, you probably don't want an enormous case with obnoxious led lighting so look into micro-atx or even mini-itx motherboards and cases if you do want something small/ unobtrusive. Just be warned building a PC with those small cases is a lot more finicky than doing it with a nice, big, airy atx tower.


To be honest I built my PC some years ago specifically for gaming and eventually decided to get a smaller case and move it into the living room, so my build isn't really a good starting point. You'd be much better off checking out /r/htpc for inspiration or, for gaming builds, looking at the build guides on /r/pcmasterrace and then customising them to suit your preference.


All in, you could probably build a PC like mine for less than £500 by ordering the parts off amazon, but for that sort of money you should be able to put something much better together with better hardware choices.


It's way cheaper than buying a ps4, paying the inflated console prices for the games instead of steam or you know, just pirating them, paying for either a freeview + box, or heaven forbid, paying the frankly ridiculous prices for sky+. For what it's worth I usually buy my games from steam when they're on sale and it doesn't cost much.

Dont think there's anything like that tbh.

Suggestions:
A standard TV hat case for the Pi4 with a USB3 JBOD enclosure.

For better cooling and performance but more expense consider fitting a Flirc case & ditching the TV hat for a USB tuner like the Happauge Dual-TV, allowing you to watch/record two channels simultaneously.