[mythtv-users] Stable DVB-S2 hardware

[Martin Bene]

Hi, very interesting question I'd also like to hear success stories :-)

I've recently built a myth box with dvb-s2 support and ran into the same problem of selecting suitable hardware for dvb-s2 + ci.

The best I've managed to come up with is the TT 3200 CI, (http://www.tt-pc.de/2764/TT-budget__S2-3200.html)  which is a single tuner PCI Card; my box has two of these. It's is running mythbuntu 11.04, so base kernel version is 2.6.38.

While the card works "out of the box" with that kernel, I've found tuning to be rather slow and quite unreliable. Tunig with szap (or szap-s2) will fail almost 1/3 of the time for some channels. Switching to the drivers from http://git.linuxtv.org/media_build.git markedly improved the situation: tuning is sometimes still slow (I've seen tuning to a channel take up to 30 seconds) but works reliably now.

Both cards use CAM Modules+ Smartcards (1x alphacrypt and 1x irdeto cryptoworks modules). Once I had my channels set up, recording works just fine. Now, GETTING the channels set up turned out to be a real pain; The full channel scan tends to miss a couple of transponders each run (tuning timeout, no channels found) even with timeout set to 45" in backend setup.

I ended up checking out the transponder list at http://www.satindex.de/astra-transponder.php, picking out the transponders containing "my" channels and manually adding these to the transponder list (using mysql) before doing a scan on existing transports.

Other hardware I also tried:
        * TT-Budget S2-1600 PCI: DVB-S2 PCI Card without CI. Much faster at tuning than the 3200, much better results with the channel scanner but long term stability problems: after a few days I'd get lots of " saa7146_i2c_writeout [irq]: timed out waiting for end of xfer" messages in the kernel logs and tuning/recording would fail for the card. After module unload/reload the card would work again. Could just be a bad card.

        * TerraTec Cinergy S2 HD CI: Card supported, CI Module not supported.

Bye, Martin

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