How to Stream Live TV from NextPVR to Any Computer in the House
Even if you have multiple computers, you only need one TV tuner card to watch TV on all of them. If you’ve set up NextPVR to watch live TV in Kodi, you can actually stream that live TV and its recordings to any computer on your network–from the browser on your laptop, or through other Kodi boxes. Here’s how to set it up.
All this assumes you’ve already bought a TV tuner, installed it in your home theater PC (HTPC), and set up NextPVR using our guide. So if you haven’t done that already, start there–then come back here for the next step.
Step One: Enable NextPVR’s Web UI
The first thing you should do is make sure NextPVR’s web UI is enabled–this feature enabled by default, but let’s check just to make sure. On your PC with the TV tuner installed, open NextPVR, then right-click the user interface. In the menu that pops up, click “Settings”, then head to the “Clients” section.
Ensure that the “Enable Web Server” box is checked, choosing an alternative web server port if you so desire (the default of 8866 is fine if you’re not sure). I’d also recommend setting a username and password, and a PIN for Kodi (labeled here as XBMC, which is Kodi’s former name).
With everything set up, you should now be able to check out the web client from on your HTPC. Open the web browser, type localhost:8866 into the address bar, then press Enter (if you set an alternative port, replace “8866” with that alternative).
If all goes well, you should now see the web UI. From here you can browse your TV listings, schedule shows to watch, watch TV from any computer, and even watch or download your recordings.
Step Two: Access the Web UI From Another Computer
The web UI, of course, isn’t that useful this way. It doesn’t do anything you can’t do from within NextPVR itself, or from within Kodi. Plus, it isn’t exactly remote friendly.
This interface is much more useful when you’re accessing it from your other computers, so you can schedule your HTPC to record shows or watch live TV from any computer in your house.
The first thing you need to do is find your HTPC’s private and public IP address. Then, from your web browser, type your private IP address, followed by a colon and the port you set above. For example: if your HTPC’s IP address is 192.168.1.6, and you left the port at the default of 8866, you’d type 192.168.1.6:8866 in the address bar and press Enter:
You can now browse your TV listings. To watch any channel, live, in your browser, click the “View Live” link below the channel’s name. A window will pop up and play.
This depends on the VLC browser plugin, which is included with the popular VLC media player, so install that program on any computer you’d like to watch TV on. This plugin doesn’t seem to work in Chrome for us, so you may need to use Firefox or Safari.
In the listings, you can also click any show’s name in order to schedule a recording. Doing so will bring up a window, which by default will set a one-time recording. If you’d prefer to record every episode of a particular show, you can also choose to do that, along with recording only new episodes and only recording the show at specific times.
Click the “Manage Recordings” button and you’ll be presented with a list of all of your recordings, both scheduled and complete. You can play them in your browser, or download them for your next road trip. You can also delete your recordings from here.
To keep this working consistently, you should really set up a static IP address or DHCP reservation for your home theater PC. Without this your IP address will change every time your router restarts, meaning any bookmarks you make for this interface will break.
Connect from a mobile device and you’ll see an entirely different user interface. You cannot watch TV or recordings from here, but you can browse the EPG and schedule recordings. The mobile interface isn’t great, to be honest: it seems to glitch out with some frequency. So we recommend sticking with the desktop.
Step Three: Access Live TV and Recordings From Your Other Kodi Boxes
The real magic in this, however, comes if you have multiple Kodi-based HTPCs in your home. If you have an HTPC with a TV tuner in the living room, for example, and a Raspberry Pi running Kodi in the bedroom, you can access the HTPC’s live TV and recordings from the Raspberry Pi without having to buy another TV tuner. That’s awesome.
Setting this up is almost identical to setting up Kodi to access NextPVR on a local computer, with one small settings change.
Open Kodi on your second PC and head to System > Add-Ons > My Add-Ons >PVR Clients. Find the “NextPVR PVR Client” add-on, select it, and hit the “Configure” button.
Select “NextPVR hostname”, then type the IP address of your NextPVR machine.
You’ll also need to provide the NextPVR PIN code you set back in step one. Again, if you plan on doing this regularly, setting up your NextPVR machine with a static IP is a good idea.
Once everything is set up, you’ll be able to use NextPVR in Kodi just the same as you use it on the local machine. Because Kodi is available for Windows, Linux, Mac, and even Android, this gives you all sorts of potential devices to steam TV from: just install Kodi and configure it to access everything over the network. As long as you have one device with a TV Tuner and NextPVR installed, you can watch Live TV on any other Kodi machine in your house.
Step Four (Optional): Enable Access From Outside Your Network
All of that is cool enough, but wouldn’t it be even cooler to schedule recordings after hearing about a show at work? Or at the bar? For that matter, wouldn’t it be nice to watch your TV and recordings from outside your home network?
This is possible, but a bit more complicated: you’ll need to dive into your router’s configuration and set up port forwarding. You need your router to to direct all requests for NextPVR’s web client to your media center. How to do this will vary widely depending on your router, but our guide to setting up port forwarding on your router offers a great overview. Just make sure you forward 8866, or whichever port you chose for NextPVR’s web UI in step one, to your HTPC’s IP address.
To connect, you will need your external IP address, or an address set up with dynamic DNS. Here’s how to find your external IP, but consider setting up DDNS if you want an easy-to-type URL instead of an IP address.
If you’ve forwarded your ports correctly, you can connect to your NextPVR from anywhere by typing your external IP or dynamic DNS address, followed by the port number you picked earlier (e.g. my.dynamic-address.com:8866 ). The web UI should appear, allowing you to schedule recordings, but you’ll notice that both streaming live TV and watching recordings does not work.
This is because, by default, streaming content from outside your home network is not enabled. To change this, you will need to manually edit the “config.xml” in your NextPVR configuration folder, which is found in C:\Users\Public\NPVR on your HTPC by default.
Edit the file by double-clicking it, or right-clicking on it and opening it with Notepad or WordPad. Ensure that AllowRemoteTranscoding and AllowRemoteStreaming are both set totrue , by replacing the word false between the relevant tags.
Save the file and you should be able to watch live TV remotely, and download your recordings from anywhere.
Streaming works well within your home network, but in my experience you probably shouldn’t count on watching live TV or recordings away from home. My internet upload speed is 30Mbps, and I’ve yet to really get live TV working from outside my home network. This makes sense: live TV takes up a lot of bandwidth, and odds are anyone without Google Fiber isn’t going to be able to watch much of anything away from home without a lot of glitches. Downloading recorded episodes could work in a pinch, though, if you’re patient, and being able to manage your PVR from anywhere is also pretty nice.