[mythtv-users] UK based system

[Nick Morrott]

On 06/07/2009, Jason Ward <Jason.Ward at 3dtlimited.com> wrote:
>
> Your breivity is no problem, but what is dvb-s2?
>
> ________________________________
> Jason Ward
> Cheif Technology Officer
> 3DT Limited

Jason,

Welcome to the list. You'll find a lot of useful information on the
MythTV wiki and the mailing archives - see the links in my sig. Also,
don't forget to make use of Wikipedia (and Google) as there's a lot of
MythTV and TV transmission info out there for straightforward
questions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-S2 will answer your
immediate question.

Choosing TV hardware can be a minefield. I'd recommend checking over
the LinuxTV wiki when choosing DVB-T and DVB-S/DVB-S2 cards as there's
a lot of helpful information on cards to avoid, and cards that are
well supported. Looking at
http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-T_Devices and
http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-S2_Devices will be helpful.

MythTV's support for DVB-S2 is currently a work in progress. You can
follow the ticket at http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/5882. DVB-S2
support entered the Linux kernel in 2.6.28 release, so is a recent
addition. Many digital satellite cards support both DVB-S and DVB-S2,
so many users use the working DVB-S support for Freesat (which
includes BBC HD which broadcast using DVB-S) and have DVB-S2
capability for the future.

I use DVB-T/DVB-S at home and have a totally stable production system
that I last rebuilt in '06 and is still going strong. The lack of
significant HD material at the time meant that I did not need to buy
particularly powerful CPUs or video cards. As I don't transcode or
commflag material on the backend, I could get away with a fairly
mediocre CPU (AMD64 3000+).

If buying components now, I'd be sure to get nVidia-based video
cards/integrated chipsets that support VDPAU. I'd be more than tempted
to get nVidia ION platform-based frontends for their small form
factor, HDTV capability and quietness. A Core2Duo/Quad or AMD
equivalent should be fine for all backend tasks. 2GiB RAM is probably
plenty, but with it being so cheap I'd probably go for 4GiB.

You don't say what version of MythTV your 'consumer' MythTV box is
running or what TV cards it uses, but I record and listen to a lot of
BBC radio and neither have the radio-specific problems you report, nor
have problems with recordings aborting. Those are not normal features
of the current 0.21 stable release.

Cheers,
Nick

-- 
Nick Morrott

MythTV Official wiki:
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