We have been Vodafone T-Box and Vodafone TV (VTV) customers for over ten years. VTV is shutting down in September, so we needed a new solution.
Early in 2020 I tried some options for streaming to our home audio system. That was a frustrating process which resulted in an audio system that works for us, using the Serviio. It is not great. That's when I decided that streaming solutions are not easy. (Except, perhaps, for those that cost a lot of money.)

This year we have the new challenge of replacing VTV. Following the Vodafone TV retirement plan: September 2022 forum, it appeared obvious that there was no easy solution for streaming broadcast TV, just like problems I had earlier with audio streaming. Perhaps the new Sky box coming later in 2022 will be similar quality to the VTV one, perhaps better, time will tell. We don't subscribe to Sky, so won't be getting that.

After reading a post promoting the software, I decided to give NextPVR a go. This was to be installed on our low power, old, Linux server at home.

The results were good. In particular NextPVR is straightforward. It is easy to find files, the files have nice names, and the system is lightweight. All things that were not straightforward using MythTV, another system we have been using till cover some VTV gaps. There were some Linux specific issues that I cover in a later post here.

I then thought that perhaps Serviio could stream the NextPVR records to our 'E' series - circa 2012 Samsung TV. I failed to get this working in 2020. Perhaps I did something wrong, or perhaps version 2 has fixed something, but our TV now happily plays NextPVR recordings.

The next section of this story will describe the installation process including details I didn't find in the minimalist NextPVR Linux installation instructions.