Built My Own Subscription TV Using a Raspberry Pi
Like a lot of people, I’ve found that my TV viewing habits have moved away from broadcast TV and towards streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. I decided it was time to have a cold hard look at how much I was spending on my TV subscription and take the brave first step to becoming a cord cutter – I phoned my Inernet Service Provider and cancelled.
My ISP sent me a fantastically designed self-assembly box in the post to mail the set top box back to them. As I packed it away, I thought that I wanted to still have access to live TV – just without being tied down in an expensive contract. I considered a few Freeview (a free DVB-T service in the UK) boxes, but it would be much more fun to build something myself. So that’s what I did.
For the hardware of my TV recorder, I used a 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 – this should be powerful enough to handle recording and playback of video files. Its super small and easily connects to my hifi using HDMI. During early testing, the Raspberry Pi got extremely hot, and while I never observed any stability issues or slowdowns, I installed a passive heat sink on it to help out.
