Introducing the Raspberry Pi TV hat

What Pimoroni called pHAT:

On a sunny day (18 Oct 2018 20:39:53 GMT) it happened A. Dumas wrote in :

Not bad, about 20 Euro... Does it allow you to use an other hat on top of it? For using GPIO I mean.

I would be more worried about decoding tv/radio signals. I think it has no smartcard/encryption support and you can only see NED1, 2, 3 and some regional stations.

Yeah definitely no decryption. Also HEVC HD is a problem. Quoting some reactions from the blog page below. The first two are especially troublesome, as they seem to be from official developers and indicate that they didn't aim this product at anything but the UK, really. This leaves the function of the Pi+HAT as a LAN streamer, with decoding/decrypting left to the receiving device. We (outside the UK) would almost certainly be better off with any DVB-T2 usb-stick.

----------------- We can decode 1080p30 H265 in software (we?ve spent a lot of time accelerating this), the only question is whether tvheadend suitably provides the right formatting information for H265.

Since we?ve been unable to test this in the UK (and we?ve not had feedback from our beta testers to the contrary), I can?t confirm it?ll work, but I?ve no reason to think it wouldn?t.

----------------- It depends on the format. I believe 1080p50, 720p50 and 540p50 are legal formats for HEVC TV broadcasts in Europe.

The latter two are fine. The first is beyond what we claim to support, but we have had reports of being able to play broadcast German 1080p50 HEVC from a TV-HAT with some overclocking.

----------------- UK Freeview SD (MPEG2) and Freeview HD (H264) broadcast on DVB-T and DVB-T2 work pretty effectively on all flavours of Raspberry Pi (from the Zero to the 3B+) in my experience using USB or networked tuners, and all flavours of Pi handle the MPEG2 and H264 576i and 1080i broadcasts in the UK fine (even with 2x deinterlace) The MPEG2 licence was needed at one point for all Pis, and may still be for the single core models.

The WiFI on the Zero W may be a bit marginal for streaming DVB-T2 H264

The UK has no encrypted DVB-T/T2 broadcasts, so decryption isn?t an issue here in the UK ? but it will be for those in other European countries where often only the Public Service Broadcasters are Free-to-Air, with many commercial services pay-TV and encrypted. The discussion of ways of decoding these services outside of using official receivers is always very tricky ? irrespective of whether you have a valid subscription card.

-----------------

Not in the UK - over 140 channels on freeview digital terrestrial... But note that 'you may need a hotter PI to actually watch TV on'.

IIRC te Pi was in fact a chipset designed for s set top box. Perhaps this is a clue as to why the Pi exists. patently as a TV it can't cut the mustard with early generaion processors.

Yes sorry, this time I actually meant you=him (& me) in the NL instead of the UK.

For controlling the tuner (setting frequency, demodulation parameters etc) it would be easy to use I2C from the pi to the hat over some GPIO pins) but how is the multimegabits/sec of transport stream pushed from the hat to the pi?

SPI probably

Bye Jack

Yes, I read that in the comments somewhere; also given as (probable? not sure it was official) reason why no stacking of TV-HATs is possible: because there is only one SPI interface on the GPIO header.

In theory the PSI interface is "multi device", meaning you can have multiple devices on the same bus. You only need to add SS (slave select) lines for every device on the bus. Said so, I suppose one TV-HAT will saturate the interface, so multiplexing is not feasible.

Bye Jack

yeah. Not sure if you can get it in NL but te atsra satllites carry lots of free (English) channels and a DVB-S card or dongle works for that - with appropiate dish.

On a sunny day (Fri, 19 Oct 2018 10:47:32 +0100) it happened The Natural Philosopher wrote in :

I have a satellite dish with an USB DVB-S2 capable receiver, however the Dutch channels seem to be encrypted, unlike the rest of teh world.

So free Netherlands DVB-T2 would be a plus. DVB-T will end here soon I have read, have USB sticks plenty for that, use those for rtl-sdr radio and stuff. You do not need a card for DVB-T2 NPO1 NPO2 and NPO3 I hope?

Else I will be fine without the Netherlands stations...

Correct. Those, and regional stations (but I don't think every transmitter carries every regional station) and NPO radio 1-x.

A link from the product page of the NL store, linked from the RPi TV HAT product page:

On a sunny day (Fri, 19 Oct 2018 15:01:21 +0200) it happened "A. Dumas" wrote in :

OK, thank you. Maybe I will get that thing, will dig a bit more into what it needs. recording transport stream with it would be cool.

I don't know the ins-and-outs of DVB, but am I right in thinking this is the RF frontend, which outputs the DVB-T(2) stream? Decoding/decrypting that stream is then someone else's problem.

If you have a USB stick, does it do anything different? I've only seen an RF frontend chip and then a USB stream chip, but I think those are still relying on software decode once it's been received over USB. For instance, few of the sticks here take smartcards:

The one advantage with this is it's a fixed, relatively low cost, target. With USB sticks, especially at the lower end, the chips inside can change between batches which makes Linux drivers problematic.

Theo

It looks very interesting.

I can see that it's possible to use it to view TV either in a browser or on the same RPi, but is there any way to view/list on a TV?

In my kitchen we have a Samsung smart TV, but we don't have an aerial connection anywhere near it, and it would be expensive and create a mess to get one installed. Hence we get TV from the Internet via iPlayer or similar, but that doesn't allow us to get /local/ BBC news, only the national news. I'm wondering if I could put an RPi where we do have an aerial feed, and pipe the multiplex to the TV via the LAN.

Dave

I use tvheadend on a PC (with PCIe tuners) generally playing to Kodi or VLC frontends, but I think it ought to be able to work with uPNP/DLNA, never tried though.

I think linux has caught up with most of the chipsets.

I have had, since 2.6.26 anyway, nothing but success with any dongles/cards.

I use kaffeine ususally to actually watch the thing and yes, CPU and GPU performance is crucial

Doesnt the Pi havce HDMI output?

No.

At best you could record onto a server and have the TV eventually pick that up via DLNA ...