Hardware recommendation? Would this be adequate?

[ronbaby79]

Disclaimer:  I'm a brand new jellyfin user, so please be kind.  (Also, I'm an unrepentant cheapskate, as noted below.)

My trusty old vintage 2017 Tivo RoamioOTA has had some "issues" lately (fixed now) but it made me realize that I'd really like to get away from proprietary solutions to recording my local OTA broadcast channels.  (I nixed Comcast back in 2017 and never looked back.)

I've got a nice UHF/VHF antenna which, together with the TiVo, pulls in most local stations.  (Everything else I want I can get over the Internet.)

In my home office I've got a file server running FreeBSD which exports a couple of NFS partitions (via WiFi) to my Home Theater PC in the living room which is a lowly Zotac Zbox BI320 (Intel 2957U) which runs only LibreELEC.  It's old, but it's just enough to watch all of my ripped content, up to 1080p, which is all I care about.  (IMHO, 4k video is just a marketing gimmick.)

So anyway, a friend will soon be sending me a nice hand-me-down, i.e. an HDHomerun model HDHR3-US (2 tuners).  My plan is to hook that up to a (new?) HTPC in the livingroom and then load up both Jellyfin and Kodi on it and start recording OTA content.  (I assume that I'll be able to run both Jellyfin & Kodi at the same time.)

Note:  My preference is to record everything using H.264(AVC) as opposed to H.265(HEVC) but I'm not religious about it.

So anyway, worst case I'll be recording 2 OTA streams (1080i max off the HDHomerun) while simultaneously viewing (w/Kodi) something that's already on my fileserver as AVC/1080p/60fps.  The question is: What's the minimum CPU I'lll need for this?  (I've googled around for awhile and haven't found a good answer to this.)

I'm guessing that neither my vintage Zotac Zbox (2957U) nor either of my two HP T620 systems (both AMD GX-415GA) will be up to this.  I'm I'm wrong, please correct me.

Other (inexpensive) options I've looked at are (1) a used Dell Wyse 5070 off eBay (J4105 or J5005) which I can get for maybe $60 or a used Minisforum GK41, also off eBay, with a J4125 APU... probably for around $75.  Would either or both of these be adequate for my needs?

Final note:  I've seen a lot of online talk about "realtime" transcoding and Jellyfin.  I'm not sure if I even need that capability.  If I had to wait until a bit after some OTA program had aired before watching it, that probably wouldn't break my heart.  Could Jellyfin just record the MPEG2 from the HDHomerun, let me watch that in real time, and then squish it down to MPEG4 afterwards, at it's leisure?

[conor]

I think you can get away without any new hardware. Just install the tvheadend addon to your kodi device and that will act as the pvr backend connected to the hdhomerun. It'll save recordings to local storage, which you should be able to mount the NAS shares to.

But there'll be no transcoding so the file sizes may be large. Jellyfin doesn't transcode recordings be default either, you should be able to do it through post-processing commands though.

[ronbaby79]

Thank you. I'll give that a try. One more thing though... what are the exact knobs and dials that I'll need to set, (in TVHeadEnd or Jellyfin) in order to get them to automagically transcode a saved MPEG2 to a smaller MPEG4 as soon as the recording has been completed?

Or do I have to schedule the transcodes (gasp!) MANUALLY?!?!

[TheDreadPirate]

I don't know about TVHeadEnd, but you can do this in jellyfin with a post processing script.  An example from mine, though I'm just copying the content from the original TS container to MP4.  Adjust the ffmpeg command appropriately.

Code:

#!/bin/bash

INPUTFILE=$1   # This is the path variable in the Jellyfin screenshot above
NEWFILE=$(echo "$INPUTFILE" | sed 's/\.ts/\.mp4/g')

/usr/lib/jellyfin-ffmpeg/ffmpeg -nostdin -y -fflags +genpts+igndts -i "$INPUTFILE" -map 0 -codec copy -max_muxing_queue_size 2048 -avoid_negative_ts disabled -max_interleave_delta 0 "$NEWFILE"

rm -f "$INPUTFILE"