[mythtvnz] satellite or terrestrial options

[Stephen Worthington]

On Tue, 07 Oct 2014 10:38:47 +1300, you wrote:

>Hi - I am moving house soon, my mythtv backend has a Hauppage DVB-T card 
>for the terrestrial aerial and works well.  The new house has a sky 
>satellite dish and no terrestrial aerial.
>
>I'm interested in list recommendations or experience or pros/cons on 
>whether to stay with DVB-T and install an aerial, or to go with 
>satellite and get a DVB-S card.  There is good line of sight for 
>either.  I know of rain fade, is this actually much of an issue in dry 
>Canterbury?  Are there more HD channels via one or the other?
>
>Which DVB-S cards are well regarded and easily obtained in NZ?  Are 
>there some that are USB so I can keep the DVB-T card or is there no 
>advantage to this given we are accessing the freeview channels only (no 
>sky subscription and no intention of getting).  The motherboard/cpu/RAM 
>is new-ish/lots of cores/large amount of.
>
>Apologies in advance if my searching of the list was lame and I failed 
>to find numerous threads on this very topic.  Otherwise thanks for any 
>feedback :)
>
>Cheers,
>Roger

There are no HD channels on Freeview DVB-S.  So if you are used to
enjoying HD, then you need to put up that aerial and continue to use
DVB-T.

It is possible to get the HD channels from Sky on DVB-S2 if you have
the right Sky card and use it in a card reader with Oscam and
FFDecsaWrapper.  But you have to pay Sky the extra fee for HD on top
of their standard fee.  I only get Sky SD channels that way, so I can
not guarantee HD also works, but SD works well with MythTV now and
there is no technical reason HD would not.

If you are buying DVB-S tuners, buy DVB-S2.  I have two: a TeVii S470
(single channel PCIe) and a TBS 9522 USB single channel one.  The
TeVii S470 is incapable of tuning to the lowest frequencies that Sky
broadcasts on for some reason.  It should work, according to its
specifications, but does not.  So it would not be able to receive from
the Sky HD channels on those frequencies.  It does receive from all
the Freeview DVB-S and Sky SD frequencies.  The TBS 9522 works on all
frequencies, but has manufacturer provided drivers that need to be
compiled each time a new kernel is installed.  These drivers are a
full compile of all the V4L drivers and are usually a bit behind what
comes with recent kernels, so can potentially cause problems with your
other tuners, although I have never had any problems with them.

TBS now have available dual DVB-S2 tuners on USB and I would expect
them to work just as well as TBS provide full Linux support.  But that
is the box with CI support that you do not want and makes them a bit
expensive.  They also have a quad DVB-S2 PCIe card:

  http://www.tbsdtv.com
  http://www.buydvb.net

I got my TBS from buydvb.net and delivery was pretty fast.  TBS do
respond to emails about Linux problems, unlike TeVii who ignored all
emails about my frequency problem.

It always pays to check TradeMe when looking for tuners - sometimes
there are good ones there at cheap prices.  But you need to know the
exact model being sold in order to see if it has Linux support -
sometimes there are variants with the same major model number but
different chipsets.