[mythtvnz] LIRC and mySKY / Pace TDS850NNZ

[Stephen Worthington]

On Thu, 28 Sep 2017 20:21:30 +1300, you wrote:

>Sky disabled my old Pace DSR2000 decoder last night with a nice blue dialog box stating my decoder is old and needs replacing.  Today the friendly sky man came round with a mySKY HDi to replace it.  It’s a Pace TDS850NNZ and I can’t get it working with LIRC.
>I’m using a Microsoft MCE USB receiver and it’s IR blaster. It worked great with the older box for the last 6+ years.
>
>Has anyone else got a mySKY box working with their setup?
>
>I’ve scoured the web looking for a lirc config files, and tried all 24 of the Pace files from http://lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/pace/
>
>I’ve also tried using irrecord. It failed with the "something went worng” message and to try using -f
>
>So I’ve tried
>
>sudo irrecord -f --disable-namespace -d /dev/lirc0 test.conf
>
>and created configs with raw codes. I’ve managed to create a config where the “2” button worked, but all the others were ignored (IR received LED just didn’t flash like it does with the real remote). 
>
>I’ve even tried setting up a harmony remote with the MySKY and using irrecord with that.  The Harmony remote will control the MySKY box, but the resulting config file won’t. 8(
>
>What else can I try? Has anyone got a mySKY box working with LIRC, maybe with a different receiver/blaster setup?
>
>
> - Wade

The new decoders are Kaon boxes and the standard MySky boxes seem to
now just be the same hardware but with your card programmed to tell
the box to be able to record.  The new decoders seem to be programmed
to use the same remotes as old MySky boxes.  I am not sure what a
MySky HDi uses though.  I seem to remember someone was reporting
success with a new decoder using some MySky tables they found
somewhere.  So if you can find that post, those tables might work for
you too.

But I really think you should be changing completely how you record
from Sky.  The new boxes seem to only have a composite video output
that you can record from, which gives terrible quality.  And using an
IR blaster to change channels is always problematic - it does just
fail sometimes for no particular reason.  If, however, you get a card
reader and put your Sky card in that, then use Oscam to talk to the
card, you can set up MythTV to record digitally as many channels as
you like via DVB-S2 tuners.  I am currently set up to record as many
as 5 channels at once, and 10 channels when the recordings overlap on
the same channel (I have a TBS6909 8 tuner DVB-S2 card).  I have
minisatip running my DVB-S2 tuners and talking to Oscam to do the
decoding, then I have my Sky channels defined in MythTV as IPTV
channels using SAT>IP (RTSP) protocol, recording from minisatip.  It
is much more reliable than I ever achieved using my old decoder and IR
blaster - just as good as my DVB-T recordings.  And the picture
quality is so much better than I got with S-Video and my PVR-500 card.