Use a Raspberry Pi to Build Your Own DVR and Record Live TV

The official Raspberry Pi TV HAT was announced late last year, and allows your Raspberry Pi to pick up digital television broadcasts via an aerial antenna. It works with DVB-T2 broadcasts, which covers most of Europe, Australia, Africa, and large parts of Asia. Unfortunately DVB-T2 isn’t broadcast in North America or much of South America. But if you’re in an area where it is broadcast, you can use a Raspberry Pi TV HAT to build your own DVR to record it.

This guide was created by Pierre-yves Baloche, who decided to build a Raspberry Pi DVR after his ISP switched to a new set top box that didn’t allow for video recording. The solution was to build his own super low-cost DVR using a Raspberry Pi. To reproduce his project, you’ll need a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, an official Raspberry Pi TV HAT, and a large hard drive or SD card for storage. Baloche used a Western Digital PiDrive, which was designed specifically for use with a Raspberry Pi, but those have been discontinued so you’ll need to find another way to store all of your recordings.

You can, optionally, also use a Pimoroni Blinkt! LED strip and a Button SHIM to provide simple control and status indicators. Baloche packed his Raspberry Pi and WD PiDrive into the enclosure that came with the PiDrive, but you can easily 3D print or purchase whatever enclosure works best for your setup. Once your hardware is ready, you can simply install Raspbian as you normally would. Then you can use software called TVHeadEnd to handle the recordings. That software can be controlled from an Android device, and will stream recorded video to a Chromecast or a computer.