DVD players are so 1999. The main advantage of adding PVR functionality to your media center is that you can then do anything you want with your recordings. You can add them to your regular XBMC library, put them on your phone or tablet for watching later, or do anything else with the resulting files. For example, on our main test machine, things worked fairly well, but changing channels is noticeably slower than on a regular TV, picture quality can vary a lot depending on your device and the codecs you use , and you may even experience the occasional freeze or crash. I bought a very cheap TV tuner and have been able to watch and record TV right from my home theater PC for much less than any other device, which is pretty awesome, and being able to have everything available from the XBMC interface is pretty great. In this case, our frontend—the program from which we watch live TV and control our recordings—is going to be an add-on in XBMC. The backend is the program that actually interfaces with your TV tuner, decodes the signal, and does the recording. Some backends come with their own frontends built-in, but allow you to use the frontend of your choice. You have depending on your operating system, but here are the instructions for two of the easier backends around. Right-click anywhere in the window to access its settings. Click the Configure button. You can also tweak other settings here. That should be everything you need to get started. For example, my HVR-1250 uses MPEG-2 and AAC to stream and record TV, so the MPEG-2 and AAC codecs are the ones I needed to change. This is the more arduous part of the process. A good place to start would be the for NextPVR, though you can install and try other codecs too check the for suggestions based on your equipment. Keep trying different codecs until you find one that gets you the picture quality, smoothness, and sound that you want, and then continue to step three. Linux Users: Tvheadend Tvheadend is a simple backend for Linux that is very easy to install, and can be managed from a web interface—which means you can manage your recordings from any computer in the house, without even entering XBMC. Create one as instructed and continue the installation. Enter your username and password when prompted. First, click the Configuration tab, then click the TV Adapters tab under that. From the dropdown menu on the left, pick your TV tuner. Now, look to the box on the right. Head to PVR Clients, and select the one for your program in this case, either NextPVR or Tvheadend. Most of the default settings should work fine here, but if your backend has a username or password, type those in now. Under General, check the Enabled box, and tweak any other settings you want here. I generally like to go to Playback and uncheck Start Playback Minimized. You may still have to do some experimentation here to find out the settings that work best for your specific hardware and software, but for the most part, you should be good to go. Try watching or recording a show from XBMC, tweak your episode list from the Live TV settings, and enjoy. Going Further This is a pretty basic setup, but you can do a lot more with your PVR once you get it set up, such as: Find a Better Programming Guide: The electronic programming guide or EPG for short you start with is probably pretty lacking at this stage. The best way to improve it is by setting up an EPG grabber, which will download a high quality episode guide and save it as an XMLTV file to which you can point your backend. Skip and Remove Commercials: You may also want to download a program like that automatically finds and skips commercials for you. Check out or for more information on how to set that up. You can even set it up to remove commercials from your video files altogether. Again, this is just the beginning. But for now, kick back with a cold one and enjoy some live TV.
