hello everyone as a one of your newest members i would like to ask all of you for help on this matter especially @wendell i'm currently researching possibility of converting cable tv signal to unicast or multicast streams so that they can be played on different devices in local network using kodi as frontend,the issue here is that i don't know of any way to do this in linux so any help would be appreciated and in advance sorry for any spelling or gramatical mistakes (english is not my native language)
Just curious why not use MythTV? MythTV has a plugin built in to kodi, all you need is a compatible TV tuner (in your case a cable tuner) this can either be placed in the kodi box or a separate machine and served to the rest of the network (Haven't found a smart TV that hasn't picked up my MythTV box as it just uses Upnp).
Other than this there is Tvheadend, MythTV is alot more extensive, but it's tricky to initially setup (as it supports alot of different features especially if you look deeper).
However if your talking about directly sending all the streams at once just remember TV signals are made up of bunches of channels (if i remember it's normally about 16 channel per multiplexer). So you would need alot of tuners to cover the whole channel list. The better option is just let MythTV control your tuners and let them be used on demand. Then all you need in the host machine, is one tuner for each stream happening at any one time.
Personally I think 4 tuners is a magic number, as that really allows you to record/watch a crazy amount of channels without any problems (for a whole family that is).
thanks for reply i was also looking at mythtv as a backend server i just didn't know if it could do the job properly. what i want is that multiple tv's be able to watch different channels at the same time even if tv is not a smart tv because front end devices would be rpi's running kodi.the thing is i don't know if mythtv has capability to send multiple different streams over the network
i just hope that i was clear enough for everyone to understand what i want with this setup
and by the way i don't know if this is off topic but can someone recommend a good (cheap) cable tv tuner (not HD HomeRun)
A normal mythtv setup can handle really as many people watching, as you can throw at it, just depends on ur amount of tuners. Just look for any DVB-S/S2 cable tuner (sadly cant help you there as just have DVB-T2) but before you buy just check to see if anyone has tried to use that card.
thanks for all the help you're a life saver
but i've been wondering does mythtv need tuner for every channel separately or something else?
and about the tuners are those usb tuners really worth it?
Nope just my best advice is get as many tuners as you think you will have people using mythtv at the same time (so if you might have two people using the mythtv server aim for 2 etc). Technically channels are bundled into groups (read about multiplexers if you are interested). Usb tuners are great, use one myself aslong as they are supported your fine (even for HD channels).
ok thanks for all the help it means a lot
will post here when my setup is completed and to make it useful for others who maybe would like to try something similar
one more thing do i need to use dvb-c tuners or i can use dvb-s/s2,dvb-t/t2 because i'm not completely familiar with those protocols