Project: repurpose the old Ipad 1st Gen as a TV viewer, thanks to Tvheadend and Pi TVHAT

Limitations of Ipad 1st Gen

• Ipad 1st Gen is stuck on iOS 5.1
• Poor CPU, that makes it laggy for any modern task
• It's a real pain to find and install suitable/available Apps for that iOS version.
• Default Video player app is really limited in term of video codecs and formats supported

Good points of Ipad 1st Gen

• Ipad's SoC has hardware decoder for H264 videos (only Quicktime can benefit from it)
• Quicktime player can play MPEG-TS stream encoded with H264 (video) + AAC (audio) up to FullHD
• a VLC version is available (software decoder only, work great with MPEG2, doesn't work with H264)
• Nice screen (IPS, while limited resolution 1024x768 px)

--> So basically it could be suitable to watch TV on Ipad1 for both TNT "SD" (MPEG2) with VLC or TNT "HD" (H264) with Quicktime internal player (need to re-encode on-the-fly the sound from AC3 to AAC).

The Ipad 1st Gen would be the frontend/player, and the backend (aerial DVB-T TV receiver and streamer) would be done by TVheadend on a Raspberry Pi equipped with Pi TV HAT. On-the-fly re-encoding of the sound from AC3 to AAC takes up to 20% CPU on the Raspi 2.

Then an interface to select channels and lunch the stream to player is needed...

• No exisitng or working native App for iOS 5.1 (based on my searchs)
• It's more flexible to develop for web frontend
• TVheadend has a good Json API
• TVheadend can host some static files served by its webserver
• The old Safari browser supports Jquery up to version 1.12.4
• The old Safari browser does support "vlc://" URL scheme to send video url to VLC
• The old Safari browser support HTML5 Video element to send video url to Quicktime