Setup tvheadend and FritzBox 6591 on Windows 10

[Frank]

First of all:
I have tried 2 configurations on the Windows 10 PC:

1. tvheadend on current Ubuntu and WSL2
2. tvheadend on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and WSL1

As I didn't get the WSL2 version to work, I will only follow the WSL1 way, here.

So, step by step:

1. As described here, install WSL1 via Powershell:

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   dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestart

2. As described here, download and install Ubuntu 16.04 via Powershell:

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   Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://aka.ms/wsl-ubuntu-1604 -OutFile Ubuntu.appx -UseBasicParsing
   

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   Add-AppxPackage .\Ubuntu.appx
   

3. Open the Ubuntu 16.04 app, setup your user+password and do the usual updating:

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   sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
   

4. As described here, install some packages

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   sudo apt -y install coreutils wget apt-transport-https lsb-release ca-certificates
   sudo wget -qO- https://doozer.io/keys/tvheadend/tvheadend/pgp | sudo apt-key add -
   

   add the package repo to your distibution:

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   sudo sh -c 'echo "deb https://apt.tvheadend.org/unstable $(lsb_release -sc) main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tvheadend.list'
   

   and finally install tvheadend:

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   sudo apt update
   sudo apt install tvheadend
   

5. During installation, you will be asked for an admin user+password for tvheadend. After the installation has finished, I needed to add a parameter to /etc/default/tvheadend so that it recognized the FritzBox. Just change the last line to (hint: sudo nano /etc/default/tvheadend):

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   TVH_ARGS="--satip_xml http://<ip_of_your_FritzBox>:49000/satipdesc.xml"
   

   and set the correct user group for user hts:

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   sudo adduser hts video
   

   Finally, restart tvheadend:

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   sudo service tvheadend restart
   

6. Launch a browser to localhost:9981. At the first time, Windows Defender should pop up and ask for permissions. Just grant them. In the browser, you can log in to tvheadend with the user you created during tvheadend installation. Then, just follow the setup wizard and change the Pass specinv setting of the 4 tuners to "On"
7. After the setup has finished, take some time to relax, have a coffee, ... Afterwards, the Muxes and Services should be there. Cheers!

I will not go into the details of channel setup etc. as most of it is straightforward. Especially, as there is a great documentation here.

Nevertheless, I have found a fairly easy way to autostart tvheadend:

1. First, enable starting the tvheadend service without a password.

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   sudo nano /etc/sudoers.d/service
   

   And add the line

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   %sudo   ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/service *
   

2. Then, all that needs to be done is adding a basic task to the Windows Task Scheduler with the simple command to be executed at user login:

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   powershell -command ubuntu1604.exe run "sudo service tvheadend start"
   

   That's it!

[Frank]

For my specific setup (with a 4300GE and internal GPU), 2 settings were crucial to make it work:

1. In tvheadend, the bind ip address for the FritzBox must be set to the tvheadend server ip.
2. In Kodi, hardware acceleration must be disabled (in player settings). By the way: The same applies for VLC.