Recently I was testing streaming live TV from a HD Homerun to XBMC on the Raspberry Pi which almost worked. One of the things I couldn’t do from the Raspberry Pi was change channel so I found a solution where you can control it from the iPad. I found that not only can you control a HD Homerun from the iPad you can also watch live TV.
So to watch live TV on the iPad with a HD Homerun networked TV tuner you need the TV Streamer app and an app called GoodPlayer. TV Streamer app is the controller and GoodPlayer does the actual streaming, actually GoodPlayer does a lot more, it can stream TV from a UPNP source and supports a wide range of video formats without needing to pre-convert files.
Once the TV Streamer app is installed on the iPad you scan the HD Homerun for TV signals, it will then list all the available TV (including logos) channels and you can then reorder the list if you want to.
When you select a TV channel it then loads GoodPlayer and you can watch the live TV channel. You can also use Airplay to send the live TV stream to an Apple TV.
It works very well and is a great way of watching live TV on the iPad. If you have a HD Homerun and an iOS device its worth getting the apps so you can get the most out of your tuners. The drawback is that the TV Streamer app is £4.99 and on top of that you can GoodPlayer with is £1.99 however GoodPlayer is a very useful app for watching videos on the iPad so is worth having.
As I mentioned GoodPlayer does a lot more than just working with the HD Homerun, it can also stream recorded TV from a Windows Media Center machine to the iPad via UPNP , it can play lots of video formats:
Files can can streamed over HTTP,HTTPS,FTP,RTSP,MMS,SFTP,SMB,MMSH,MMST,RTP,UPnP and UDP or copied via iTunes, it even has a wifi mode where you can browse to the iPad from another device using it’s IP address and copy files over that way. I got it playing MKV files without any issues.
So the combination of TV Streamer app and GoodPlayer make a great way to watch live TV on the iPad (or iPhone) and GoodPlayer is an excellent app to have on your iOS device.
One thought on “Streaming live TV to an iPad with TV Streamer and GoodPlayer”
i was looking for something like this the other week in my search for a software replacement for my unreliable slingbox using the unused stream from my dreambox 500s and vlc. still seem to be having trouble getting the stream from the dreambox but this gives me some more ideas…
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i was looking for something like this the other week in my search for a software replacement for my unreliable slingbox using the unused stream from my dreambox 500s and vlc. still seem to be having trouble getting the stream from the dreambox but this gives me some more ideas…