I don't need to know how to make TVHeadend transcode on the fly; why would I want to degrade the quality of the .ts streams? I'm sure if I wanted to do it I could figure it out, and I already do know how to change the stream profile, if that's what you are talking about. No, I don't like the old style LNB's that require the mechanical polarotor unit, I prefer to use equipment made in the 21st century that uses voltage switching of polarity, same as is used by all the commercial satellite providers (and I realize there are a lot of guys in this forum that prefer the older stuff, but that's not in any way germane to this discussion). Why would I want to use a finicky mechanical device that tends to go bad after a number of months or years? And finally, I don't know where you are getting that I don't know how to connect an LNB to a DVB tuner, since ALL my LNB's are now connected to DVB-S2 tuners (TBS brand). If you are searching really old posts to try to dig up some dirt so you can try to smear my credibility, I will freely admit that three or four years ago I was a real dummy when it comes to this stuff, but I have learned a lot since, including that in my experience a Raspberry Pi is no substitute for a real HTPC.
Further, anyone who uses OpenElec or LibreElec has no business talking about the technical competence of someone who doesn't. Those distributions are specifically intended for people who don't want to learn anything. If you install one of those, you probably don't want to know how to use Linux in any way, you don't want to install drivers, and you want much of the setup done for you. And that is fine if all you want to do is OTA ATSC. But if you are trying to receive DVB-S2 signals from satellites, sooner or later you are going to bump up against the limitations of that software. Some people probably just accept those limitations, just as they accept that most satellite receivers won't play the 4:2:2 signals.
However, all that said, let's go back for a minute to that "transcode on the fly" business. Although you didn't say it, it sounded like you were implying that TVHeadend could transcode a problem video stream to something that a Raspberry Pi can play, in real time. Now, that can work in some circumstances, where it's just a container issue. I've used an ffmpeg pipe in real time to fix a couple of channels that were not displaying the video correctly. But, that's not true transcoding. Transcoding where you are changing to a lower bitrate takes time, and it uses a lot of CPU resources. If you are using ffmpeg, I have found that transcoding typically takes about twice as long as the length of a recording, and that's on a fast desktop machine. Unless you have discovered some magic secret sauce (and I'd need to see it to believe it), there is no way you are going to transcode a high-bandwidth 4:2:2 signal down to something a Raspberry Pi can play "on the fly" (in real time). You can do it as a post-processing event, but not in real time, and if you try to do it on a Raspberry Pi I would not plan on viewing the recording the same evening.
One of the big problems with TVHeadend is that their documentation kind of sucks, in some cases because it's not kept current with new revisions of the software. So it is not that easy to figure out how to do things (and if you find it easy, you could perhaps help a lot by contributing documentation). But I would be blown away if you can demonstrate how to do that type of video transcoding in real time, because that would mean they are using something much better than ffmpeg. Again, I know they can change the container (going from a .ts stream to matroska, for example - that's just a matter of selecting the correct stream profile in TVHeadend) but that is not the same as lowering the bitrate of a high-bitrate stream so that a Raspberry Pi can play it.
I don't pretend to know everything (there are guys in this forum who know a lot more about this stuff than I do, especially those guys who eat, breathe and sleep Linux) but I have actually tried OpenElec and I have actually tried using a Raspberry Pi for a frontend (in fact I tried OpenElec on a Raspberry Pi!) and I quickly became very frustrated with the limitations. I should also add that while I have attempted to do this sort of thing with an original Raspberry Pi and a Raspberry Pi 2, I've never had a Raspberry Pi 3; it is remotely possible that the Pi 3 is fast enough to overcome some of the shortcomings of the earlier models. People are free to try whatever they want and if it works for them, more power to them. But if someone is starting out a a rank beginner, I would at least like them to know that if they choose to start out with OpenElec or LibreElec they are likely to encounter some limitations that they would not experience if they were running complete Linux build on a good backend system. I'm not denying those might be easier to set up and get working initially, but there are some very real tradeoffs down the road, particularly if you want to be able to install additional software for any reason.
Anyway, I'm done. Use what you want, feel free to ignore everything I've said if you like. TVHeadend is not that easy to set up and use, so many people get frustrated with it and abandon it before really realizing how powerful it is, and unfortunately there is nothing I can say or do to fix that underlying problem.
