VDR

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Home icon grey.png   ▶ PVR ▶ VDR

VDR (The Video Disk Recorder) is an open source PVR backend application for Linux designed to allow any computer to function as a DVR (Digital Video Recorder), in order to stream Live TV, radio, and record television programming using the computer's hard drive. The computer needs to be equipped with a digital TV tuner adapter (or TV tuner card). VDR uses drivers from the LinuxTV project.

By levering existing third-party PVR backend applications such as VDR that specialize in receiving television signals and support a client–server model which Kodi can access via a PVR client addon, these PVR features allows you to watch Live TV, listen to radio, view a EPG TV-Guide, schedule recordings and enables many other TV related features, all using Kodi as your primary interface once the initial pairing connection to VDR have been done and and configuration of the PVR client addon for it is complete.


Installing VDR

See: VDR/Installation


VDR quick start guide

If your tuner hardware is not detected or is having issues, check http://linuxtv.org for driver support.


Connecting Kodi to VDR

To connect Kodi to a backend system (VDR in our case) you first need the PVR extension (which is part of Kodi since version 12 "Frodo") and the "VDR VNSI Client" addon.

Xbmc-vdr-vnsi.png

On the VDR side you need a corresponding plugin to offer the content (live TV and recordings) to Kodi. The plugin for VDR over VNSI is available here: https://github.com/mdre77/vdr-plugin-vnsiserver (The original development at https://github.com/FernetMenta/vdr-plugin-vnsiserver is not maintained any longer).

  1. Go to Settings -> Add-ons -> Install from repository -> PVR Clients and select the VDR add-on
  2. Select "Configure"
  3. For Linux installation see... Ubuntu PVR add-ons


VDR VNSI Client.settings.png
VDR Hostname or IP
The hostname or IP address of the server where VDR is installed. If on the same machine then 'localhost' or 127.0.0.1 can be used.
VNSI Port
The default for VDR with VNSI is 34890 but this will need updating if you have changed it in on the VDR side.
Priority
Priority is a VDR feature. Every task that requires a device is related to a priority. Recordings for example have a priority from 0 to 99 (default 50). Assume VDR records some tv show and the timer was set with priority 50. Now a second timer starts and no device is available. Higher priorities can interrupt lower ones. VDR defines priority for live view to 0. Since vnsi is a plugin, I defined default for live to -1
Actually it should work with 0 and -1. If it doesn't, there may be some other plugin that pretends to be a device. I would start with disabling all other plugins.
Character Set Conversion
If Kodi and VDR use different character sets, then enable this option to convert the texts after receiving them from VDR.
Connect timeout(s)
Recommended value: 15s
The default (3 seconds) is too short, specially for VDR backends not on the same machine as KODI.
A too small value results in TV not working
Allow VDR Messages
Do you allow the VDR to display messages inside KODI?
Create channel groups automatically on the server
?



Additional guides and links