DVB-S2 card with best/optimal out-of-the-box support for Ubuntu

Christian Flaig

Hello,

first post here. Would like to try out tvheadend (long time user of XBMC/OpenELEC) though, and am looking for a good DVB-S2 card. The machine I'd like to use for tvheadend is an older AMD Athlon X2-235 on an Asus Board. Got a PCIe x1 and x16 available. Also a PCI slot, but would prefer PCIe. Only need one tuner for the moment.

So just a (hopefully) painless installation.

I plan to use Ubuntu server 13.04 or 13.10, 64bit.

Any recommendations? I live in Switzerland, so Amazon.de should sell them. :-)

Thanks for your help.

Chris

Raymond Paulsen

I would probably recomend the tbs dvb cards. Cheap and good support for it.

hauppage cards have some firmware issues with kernel 3.2. If you use debian stable you need to add the backport for a more recent kernel to get it to work. Iam currently using single tuner pci card nova s2

Iam also thinking about buying some new cards, iam currently looking into the tbs 6985.

Gary Brown

i'm using this card

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mystique-SaTiX-S2-Sky-PCI-DiseqC/dp/B005IFWDIY

it requires firmware and drivers from here

http://www.dvbsky.net/Support.html

Rob D

I have a 6985 and support is buggy under Linux, you need to patch the drivers and even then a lot of people have trouble with artifacting when tuning multiple HD channels. Also it has some severe detection issues in some boards, other TBS boards are great.

Raymond Paulsen

This was i not aware of at all. to bad as i realy like that adapter from tbs.

so you can confirm there are issues with the tbs 6985 adapter, are you shure this issues are not related to the tbs 6984 adapter?

Is there any problems regarding the hardware or is the artifacting your are talking about firmware related?

Is there any ongoing work to fix this issues?

Alfred Zastrow

I would not buy an adapter from tbs, because of a closed source blob within the driver. Take a look at digital-devices - they are running smoothly and you can combine up to 8 receicers per card.

br
Alfred

Raymond Paulsen

Darn it was good to know this before i bought new cards..

The digital devices is a more modular design. How is the CI stuff working out with mumudvb or dvblast?

Can you describe what you meant by max 8 tuners? Its possible to kompile the kernel for more adapters so 8 is not the limit.

how is the prices on this adapters?

Rob vh

I have a DD Octopus (1 PCIe card that can connect up to 4 adapter cards, each capable of 2 cables). So max. of 8 /dev/dvb/adapterx on 1 PCIe. I'm running 3 DuoFlex-S2 cards (with 6 cables) to a diseqc with 3 LNBs and 2 90cm dishes.
However, I have almost 50m cable from my diseqc to the adapter cards. I think the DD cards are not as good with lower S/N ratio as, e.g., a Samsung D5700 TV. So we see perfect HD stream on the D5700 and at the same time the DuoFlex-S2 cards show HD static for the same channel. Other HD channels with better S/N are fine.
Also, I've had to put mesh around the adapter cards, they did not like so sit next to my graphics card.
DD has a CI card interface, but those have no use with tvheadend.
I'm using the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with the standard ddbridge device driver.

Rob D

> Is there any problems regarding the hardware or is the artifacting your are talking about firmware related?

Is there any ongoing work to fix this issues?

The artifacting is likely a driver issue. I have not tried Windows but quite a few have and artifacting is Linux only it seems. I would assume it could be fixed but no word from TBS, the patch helps tremendously. It affect a large number of MBs but multiple users have confirmed that a change of MB can fix it (Looks to be some sort of PCI bus data issue maybe).

The hardware incompatibility issues are at least obvious; if you have an incompatible board the card wont be detected at all, multiple Asus, Tyan and Supermicro boards have been found incompatible (It seems to be related to PCI-E 1.0A compliance mode as far as I can tell).

Take a look here:

http://www.tbsdtv.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=142

MY advice would be buy on sale or return or test with your MB first.

Raymond Paulsen

Ok afte rlokking into the issues with tbs it seems that that card is out of the question.

But iam seriously interested in the digital devices solution octopus/cine

what is the difference betwhen the cine and octopus series, other then its modular design?

how is the different modules handled, CI slots mixing tuners? does this require different firmware or is this handled in the same firmware?

i see devices from DD has option for use with CI cams, this is something iam very interested in.
my channels iam interesting to have does not work with oscam. iam thinking of using this card with mumudvb or dvblast to be able to use CI cams for those particular channels,

then multicast itso tvheadend can pick it up as a iptv service.

have anybody had any experience with using octopus devices with mumudvb or dvblast?

how is the cam setup done? octopus series support MDT so you can use 1 cam for max 4 tuners, very nice feature.

ProfYaffle

I can't comment on the Digital Devices units. If you can tolerate USB, the PCTV 290e is a good, well-supported DVB-S2 stick - although it's recently been replaced with the 292e which has no support at all, so beware.

Regarding TBS, I used a Qbox for a long time and there was no real problem with it. The biggest issues were because of their drivers, as has been mentioned, specifically:

1. They don't play nicely with other tuners. TBS ships a customised v4l tree that's never as up-to-date as the real tree... that means it support older, well-established tuners but is never current with newer ones so you end up having to decide between support for another tuneror the TBS tuner, but not both.

2. Because of the customisation, you need to recompile every time your kernel changes. You can use dkms for this if you want to, but it's an annoying step versus tuners that have kernel support.

I'm a couple of years out of date, and things have moved on with the open source TBS driver, but that was my experience.

Raymond Paulsen

yes seems that the tbs firmawre is a pile of crap :-) i realy thought this devices was ok.

USB will not cut it for me, so how will usb cope with multiple FULL ts streams for mumudvb?

USB devices tends to reorder itself in linux after reboot, extra stuff to consider.

iam special interested to know how the digital devices octopus works with 1 smith conax cam with MDT and multiple full mux reception with mumudvb.

it looks to me that the digital devices can be setup with 1 CI and 4 tuners, this 4 tuners can all use the same CI for decoding. (MDT)

octopus series is modular so it means you can buy a single slot CI bridge and use 4 tuners, (2 dvb-s2 and 2 dvb-t2) or even a bridge for 8 tuner capacity, but looses CI capability then

at the moment it seems to me that the octopus series from digital devices would be the best choice to use regarding it beeing modular, change tuner types, add CI possibility (something i need)

so what i realy need to confirm before i buy this stuff is if the octopus with ci slot and a T2 tuner with a smith MDT conax cam can decode an utilize norwegian rikstv

this is dvb-t2 streams encrypted with conax.

it have been very nice to have the option to use CI cams in tvheadend directly

Gary Brown

if your going for that setup you'll need to make sure the ci slot can be used by oscam or something simmilar.

for testing this is a bit overkill on the costs and would recommend the card I used above. cheapest dvb-s2 card out there. if you need to decrypt from a card have a look at buying a usb card reader and using that through oscam.

Raymond Paulsen

CI - common interface with hardware cams can not be used in oscam. only support for that with DVBlast or Mumudvb

yes have lots of smargos and omnikeys laying around, the problem is this channels i want from DVB-T2 is CAS7 crypted with Conax

so its not going to work with OScam without the pairing stuff fixed.

USB devices is not going to work out, currently iam using 3 x Hauppage NOVA S2 PCI cards,
they are working good but there is some kernel problems in debian stable with the firmware for this devices.

Alessandro Matano

Hi All,

interesting post here. I'm about to do the same. I've successfully configured tvheadend with a DVB-T usb adapter and I'm watching with XBMC. All in the same machine (frontend + backend).

I'm thinking to add also a DVB-S adapter for satellite feed, but I need to decrypt with a legitimate subscription and cart.

Does anyone know if I could do with a common card reader (already tested working and recognized by the system)? How I could have tvheadend working with cccam (perhaps) to decrypt the channels?

Does anyone configured it already?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!