[mythtvnz] Satellite tuner recommendations please

[Stephen Worthington]

On Mon, 23 May 2016 17:03:34 +1200, you wrote:

>Hi All,
>
>I currently have two TeVii S421 DVB-S tuner cards, which suffer
>from a couple of problems:
>(1) They seem to be not very sensitive, in that my Freeview box
>can tune all stations with no trouble, but the cards are a bit
>iffy on some channels.
>(2) They are supposed to work with the 3.13 kernel under Trisquel,
>an Ubuntu-derived Linux distro, but they don't.  They work on the
>same hardware under Debian Wheezy, using the Liplianin drivers and
>an older kernel (3.2, I think).
>
>I would like to know if anyone can recommend anything better.
>Need something that:
>* Works with stock 3.13 kernel
>* Is reasonably sensitive
>* Available in NZ
>* Not too outrageously expensive
>
>Cheers,
>Austin.

What sort of card are you looking for?  The S421s are PCI, and PCI
tuner cards are not very easy to find now.  Nor are DVB-S2 tuners as
generally available in NZ as they used to be, let alone Linux
compatible ones, so you may have to buy directly from overseas.

I have a TeVii S470 PCIe DVB-S2 tuner, and a TBS 5922 USB DVB-S2
tuner.  Both work OK, but for the TBS one you need to compile the TBS
drivers as it is not supported in kernel.  That replaces all the V4L
drivers with the ones from TBS, so it can occasionally cause problems
with other tuners.  I have not encountered that though.  Recently,
there has been work on getting an in kernel driver for the 5922, but I
have not tried using that.  I am looking at possibly replacing them
with a TBS 6909 8 tuner DVB-S2 PCIe card, but that also needs the TBS
drivers.  You buy TBS cards from this site:

  http://www.buydvb.net

They have a large selection, including USB as well:

  http://www.tbsdvb.com

While looking at my options, I ran across the Vbox Ethernet tuners.
They are now supported in MythTV (certainly in 0.28, but possibly also
in 0.27).  Their web site sells to NZ, and they have dual tuner DVB-S2
and combined DVB-S2/DVB-T models:

  http://www.vboxcomm.com/new-zealand-free-tv.html