mrtam/relay

HDHomeRun Emulator

Relay

Relay is a software emulator for the Silicondust HD HomeRun series of network tuners. It has been designed to work out of the box with Plex DVR, and Channels DVR. Other services which are HDHR capable will likely work too - however these are untested.

OK cool. How does this differ to tvhProxy / Antennas / etc?

Relay is a modular full application built using the ASP.NET Core 2.2 Framework, with Entity Framework (EF) utilised for persistence. Channel lineups are persisted to a SQLite database, with support for channel favorites just like a real HD HomeRun.

A basic frontend is in place in addition to the regular REST framework. This frontend allows for browsing and marking channels as favourites, and manually invoking a guide update.

Relay has been designed to be completely modular - with the notion of supporting multiple provider backends. Right now there is currently support for Tvheadend - however within the project scope is to extend this to other platforms, such as IPTV playlists.

Finally, this application fully supports the UDP discovery protocol. Several DVR systems such as Channels DVR make use of this protocol to discover devices on the network. Without this in place, these apps cannot make use of the tuner.

Configuration

Configuration is set using environment variables:

Parameter	Default	Description
relay_address	127.0.0.1	The address used in the BaseURL given out to all REST/UDP calls. Must be a valid address.
relay_tunercount	2	The number of tuners to broadcast in discovery calls.
relay_tunerdeviceid	1337	The device ID provided to discovery calls.
relay_updateintervalseconds	3600	The interval in seconds between guide updates.
relay_databasepath	.	The path to where the database should be stored.

Provider Configuration

Tvheadend has separate configuration.

NB: It is recommended to configure a user with streaming credentials and provide these to Relay here. Channels DVR can run into difficulty using the Tvheadend provider if credentials are not set, as the default noauth implementation uses a token based system that is not compatible with this DVR.

Parameter	Default	Description
relay_tvheadend__url	http://127.0.0.1:9981	The location of where Tvheadend is running.
relay_tvheadend__username	-	Username for login
relay_tvheadend__password	-	Password for login

Running

Relay can be run directly on any Windows / Mac / Linux machine, but requires .NET Core 2.2 to be installed prior.

cd relay
dotnet run

Docker

Docker is the preferred method of deployment. Docker images are hosted on the Cloudsmith platform.

docker run --rm -it \
    -e relay_address=192.168.1.2 \
    -e relay_tvheadend__url=http://192.168.1.1:9981 \
    -e relay_tvheadend__username=foobar \
    -e relay_tvheadend_password=wibble \
    -e relay_tunercount=4 \
    -e relay_databasepath=/config \
    -v /some/path/to/config:/config \
    docker.cloudsmith.io/mrtam/relay/relay:latest

When using Docker, it is important that the relay_databasepath parameter is set to /config. The Dockerfile creates this folder, and is a safe place for mounting locally to persist the database following container destruction.

Finally ...

This is very much a WIP project, and as such I welcome pull requests and comments. I created this project mostly out of need and dissatisfaction with the existing solutions, and welcome contributions to make Relay the best it can be.

Please fork, update, and PR!!