[mythtvnz] Looking for modern video input devices (vs PCI cards)

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 23 May 2012 20:51:47 +1200, you wrote:

>On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 8:00 PM, Stephen Worthington
><stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:
>> On Wed, 23 May 2012 12:47:06 +1200, you wrote:
>>
>>>It's been a long long time since I built my original system and I'm looking at updating parts of it before moving to MythTV 0.25.
>>>
>>>It currently has a PVR-150 and 2 x SkySTAR DVB-S cards, all PCI.
>>>
>>>PCI slots are getting pretty rare from my scanning of PBTech and similar sites, so building a new system with my current cards might be hard to do.
>>>
>>>So:
>>>
>>>What is the current equivalent of a PVR-150? My requirement is for capturing off a SD Sky digital box via S-Video, preferably via a card/adaptor with MPEG2 encoder rather than a frame grabber and CPU encoding. If I can move this to PCIe then finding a new motherboard becomes a lot easier.
>>>
>>>Has anyone tried a Hauppage HD-PVR with Sky HD over here?
>>>
>>> - Wade
>>
>> I had no problem finding a modern motherboard with two PCI slots last
>> week when my old one (Asus M2NPV-VM) became unstable.  For $510.81, I
>> got these:
>
>OP has 3 PCI cards :)
>
>The HD-PVR - I do not recall seeing anyone using one of these here,
>but I haven't searched the archive either.
>
>There are a lot of comments about flakiness on mythtv-users, HD-PVR
>problems seem to occupy a lot of time on the list.
>
>One thing I have never been sure on - how do they go with 50Hz PAL-land video?
>
>Also I don't have a Sky box, let alone a Sky HD box - do they have a
>usable component out? Or are they hdmi only?

It is easy to replace a PCI (or PCIe) tuner with a USB one.  Linux
support seems best for USB tuners, rather than PCIe cards - plenty to
choose from for DVT-T and a few for DVB-S and DVB-S2.  I had to do
that on my old motherboard, so I got a USB DVB-S2 tuner to replace my
satellite card.  This is what I got:

  http://www.tbsdtv.com/products/tbs5922-dvb-s2-tv-tuner-usb.html
  http://www.buydvb.net/tbs5922-usb-dvbs2-tv-box_p41.html

It is a little fiddly to install the driver (you have to compile it
from source), but it works well and they have full Linux support if
you have any problems.

What is not easy to replace from a PCI card is an MPEG2 hardware
encoding card like the PVR-150 or PVR-500.  Analogue TV is dying out
fast right around the world, so no-one is producing new analogue cards
with the hardware encoder.  So all you really need the PCI slots for
are those irreplaceable cards.

BTW It is theoretically possible to use your Sky card in a card reader
or other satellite box and use it to decrypt data received over a
normal DVB-S or DVB-S2 tuner card.  In NZ, the OpenBox S10 satellite
receiver is for sale and works with some of the Sky cards (I have one
and it works with mine).  The S10 provides a TCP port to use for
decryption traffic, and sasc-ng is reported to be able to do the
decryption in Linux.  I am going to try to get that going, to replace
my S-Video connection to my Sky decoder, so that I can get proper
digital recordings.