Question to IceTV regarding tvheadend, LibreELEC and IceBox build process

[DeltaMikeCharlie]

With LibreELEC/IceBox, tvheadend is not provided as a stand-alone package, but as a Kodi addon that launches the tvheadend executable on startup.  This Kodi Addon reports its version number as being 4.2.8-36.

The WebUI reflects this as well stating: Build: 4.2.8-36 ~ LibreELEC Tvh-addon v11.0.0.0 (2023-04-26T23:18:34+0000)

On the TVH GitHub repository, however, the latest published version seems to be 4.2.7.  Furthermore, the last release of TVH seems to have been over 5 years ago.

It would seem that perhaps LibreELEC build their own TVH for inclusion with the Kodi distribution that they bundle.  The higher version number plus the suffix plus the build date suggest that LibreELEC may also have done some patching and/or improving somewhere along the way.

My question for IceTV is:  Do you rebuild LibreELEC from source or do you take a pre-built LibreELEC image and rebrand it?

If the IceBox 'firmware' is built from source every time, then the possibility of modifying TVH in a meaningful timeframe is much greater.

[Daniel Hall at IceTV]

We build our own from LibreELEC source with some changes.

We also have a custom build of TVH that has better scanning tables for Australia, so it is possible to make changes if need be.

[DeltaMikeCharlie]

We also have a custom build of TVH that has better scanning tables for Australia...

Is this just the Mux frequencies, bandwidths, etc, or something deeper?

...so it is possible to make changes if need be.

Did you fork this directly from the TVH GitHub repository, or does it come via LibreELEC?
What are the chances of IceTV opening up their version of the TVH source code to the IceTV user community?

Same questions as above except for Kodi.

[prl]

Is this just the Mux frequencies, bandwidths, etc, or something deeper?

Mux broadcast properties more generally, but only the mux.

Here's an example (for ABC Melbourne):

Code Select Expand

# ABC Melbourne
[CHANNEL]
    DELIVERY_SYSTEM = DVBT
    FREQUENCY = 226500000
    BANDWIDTH_HZ = 7000000
    CODE_RATE_HP = AUTO
    CODE_RATE_LP = AUTO
    MODULATION = QAM/64
    TRANSMISSION_MODE = 8K
    GUARD_INTERVAL = 1/16
    HIERARCHY = NONE
    INVERSION = AUTO
Enigma2-based systems like the Beyonwiz firmware use similar scan tables (but in a different format, XML).

https://github.com/tvheadend/dtv-scan-tables/blob/tvheadend/dvb-t/au-Melbourne

[Daniel Hall at IceTV]

We also have a custom build of TVH that has better scanning tables for Australia...

Is this just the Mux frequencies, bandwidths, etc, or something deeper?

...so it is possible to make changes if need be.

Did you fork this directly from the TVH GitHub repository, or does it come via LibreELEC?
What are the chances of IceTV opening up their version of the TVH source code to the IceTV user community?

Same questions as above except for Kodi.

From the LibreELEC github, and at this point for Kodi and TVH the only change we have made is for the scanning tables file for TVH, just removing some frequencies as with TVH scanning they were causing double ups of channels.

[DeltaMikeCharlie]

From what I have been able to find in the LibreELEC repository on GitHub:  When LE is built, the build process downloads a file from the TVH archive.  For v4.2, the file dates in the archive file are all 16 Nov 2019.  This seems to indicate that the archive file was created about 18 months after the 'official' 4.2.7 release.

I don't see any indication that the LE team have done any major changes apart from 6 patches that seem mostly to do with the directory structure.  Short of doing a file-by-file comparison, I can't yet tell if the LibreELEC TVH differs too greatly from the official TVH release although I suspect not.

I'm guessing that the LE team have just rolled in a few critical patches as well as some config changes for the LE platform, but the feature set is basically unchanged but called it v4.2.8.  I'm note sure what the '-36' in the version number indicates.

There is also an alpha package for TVH v4.3 ('v4.3-2091') with file dates of 27 Jan 2023 plus 2 patches.  As there has been no official TVH release in 5 years, and the TVH roadmap says that their next release will be v4.4, perhaps LE may ne intending to go it alone with an unreleased version of TVH.