[mythtv-users] Looking for advice moving to DVB-S

[Martin Bene]

> Thanks for this information. I always thought it must be 
> somehow like this, but your explanation makes it really clear. 
> I guess here in Europe those "combined Astra and Hotbird" satellite 
> dish/LNB is what I should go for. As far as I understand, these 
> dish/LNB combination make a compromise on having 
> just one dish for 2 (relatively close) satellite against a 
> somewhat weaker signal because the dish is not optimally 
> aligned with either satellite.

I haven't used that kind of setup, so I can't say much here. 

> > > I will buy at least one, maybe 2 (legal) CAM modules. Are
> > > there any gotchas or can I just plug them into the CI and
> > > Myth will work happily? Is all the decrypting done on the
> > > card/driver? Are there well supported  cards with
> > > multiple CI slots?
> >
> > There's a CI module for the Hauppauge nova that supports 
> two CI modules;
> > the nova-ci-s just supports one module.
> 
> Hm, are you sure about that? The docs fo the Nova-CI-S says 
> that it also can fit 2 cards. But I haven't seen it in real 
> life ... Anyway, I will go with your suggestion because I 
> prefer having the CAM's accessible from the front - 
> the additional CI module is a 3.5 inch module, right?

Argh, managed to mistype that.

* The NEXUS-s has the CI module with two slots, front mountable like a
floppy drive.
* The NOVA-CI-S has a single-slot CI Module mounted on a PCI "dummy"
board (i.e no electrical connection to the PCI bus at all, just uses the
PCI slot for mechanical mounting. I'm using one of these in my box and
the one I've got accepts only a single Module; may have changed since I
got mine.

> This is absolutely new to me. I read up a bit on DVB-S2 and it looks 
> interesting. I guess it wont take long until the cards hit 
> the market. 

Receiver boxes should be available round beginning of december; no Idea
when DVB-S23 cards will be available.

> Am I right in assuming that the dish/LNB I am going to buy now 
> will be able to receive DVB-S2? I just will have to buy one of the 
> forthcoming cards to be able to enjoy HDTV?

As far as I know, yes, dish + LNB should be OK.

BTW, there'll be another hurdle to consider before you'll be able to
actually watch those new HD channels: the'yre np longer using mpeg2 as
the video codec but instead decided to use MPEG-4 AVC/H.264; no idea if
myth tv supports that codec and what kind of hardware you'd need to
actually decode such a HD stream.

If you read german, there was a news item on heise.de:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/result.xhtml?url=/newsticker/meldung/6538
2

Bye, Martin