Which is a good DVB-S/S2 card for TV headend?

Kaya Saman

Hi,

I wonder if someone could offer me some advice, currently I'm using a satellite box with a CI card linked to the TV. What I'd like to do is to incorporate the satellite into my media center.

There are numerous models on the market some of which are compatible with LinuxTV and others which are not. My distro is Arch Linux with latest 3.15 kernel.

At present I'm looking at the DVBSkye S950C:

http://www.dvbsky.net/Products_S950C.html

Does anyone have any experience with these cards or the manufacturer; what are they like?

Another question linked to this, is does TV Headend have CAM support? And will any CAM module work? I have heard that my satellite provider has locked things into their own box - the satellite box has the providers branding on it; so I'm wondering if it would work or not?? Also will the above card work with a motorized dish?

I currently have a backup plan, with a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1900 on the way, this will at least enable DVB-T capability and also has 3x RCA inputs for non-HD external devices; so worst case scenario I will just link the sat box up to this interface. But of course advantage of internal tuner is that all can be controlled via my frontend - XBMC.

Thanks for any responses.

Alfred Zastrow

DVBSKY has f**king drivers, I would recomend this card:

http://www.digitaldevices.de/Cine_S2.html

I've 3 cards with 10 tuners atm, some more will follow.

br
Alfred

Kaya Saman

Wow that looks amazing. Thanks you for the link.

Btw, are all CAM modules supported? As I stated there is some confusion if the CI card from my satellite provider will work on other devices....

Hmm... looks like they have a list of compatible CAMs on the site, time to go have a look.

Alfred Zastrow

There is a CI-adapter configuration on a module parameter level, but I don't know if this works under tvh. Maybe for testing I will buy some of this parts within the next month. At the time beeing there is a lot of free to air stuff in Germany.

br
Alfred

Kaya Saman

Thanks Alfred, I have seen that Digital Devices produces the adapters but getting them to work with my satellite provider is another thing.

Also I'm based in West Europe not Germany :-)

I do get access to things like Eutelsat, however my main concern is Turksat as this is subscribed to by my family.

Though I would much prefer the dish to be pointing the other way towards the US to get Fox Sports live and ESPN etc....

Quentin D.

It's been 6 months i use a Tevii S471 without any issues. It works on Debian, with kernel 3.13.

The TeVii S700 DVB-S/S2 CI Box would probably work too (http://www.tevii.com/Products_S700_1.asp) but I haven't tested.

Kaya Saman

Many thanks for that!

I have just checked the site out and looks pretty good.

As stated above, I currently am "trying" to use a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1900 with my current set-top-box, but it has a few issues.

TVH doesn't recognize the composite MPEG-2 encoder meaning I had to switch over to Myth to get that portion working. also I can't use the analog inputs and the DVB-T input together. I ended up having to disable the DVB-T tuner in Myth to get the set-top-box to work. DVB side works fine in TVH but no joy on the composite input :(

After trying and testing both I can definitely suggest that TVH is my preference though currently not working with my "current" device.

Guess I'll need to upgrade quickly to one of the tuners posted above.

Quentin D.

I have a hybrid card but I only use dvb-t. I don't see analog in tvheadend but i'ts not a problem, i don't use it.
I think you have no choice to buy another device, but first you can check linux compatibility here : http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hardware_Device_Information

Kaya Saman

Though this has been commented on before, can't remember where now but found through Google; the Homepage "Overview" does state this:

[quote]
Tvheadend is a TV streaming server for Linux supporting DVB-S, DVB-S2, DVB-C, DVB-T, ATSC, IPTV, and Analog video (V4L) as input sources.

[/quote]

So not sure why no "analog" support but would be really great if I could get my set-top-box working with TVH as there's no guarantee that the CI card is going to work with a DVB-S/S2 adapter, even though I will definitely try it.

Gary Brown

I use this card which is a cheap clone of a dvbsky card and have had no problems with it's usage. it uses there drivers and they are 100% working just a little tricky to setup at times and whenever you update your kernel you need to install them again.

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

Kaya Saman

Thanks for that. Yep it is pretty low cost :) (that doesn't mean a bad thing though!)

Looks like after grabbing firmware for it, it should work "right out of the box":

http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Mystique_SaTiX-S2_Dual

Kaya Saman

Hi,

I just tried emailing DigitalDevices regarding Alfred Zastrow's suggestion above however they don't seem to respond?

I tried both emails from the site, one for company and one for shop; also the online form from the shop site....

Does anyone know how to get in contact with them? Maybe they just don't have good English, though strange for a German company....

Thanks.

alf alfonsius

mine is a http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/TBS6985_PCIe_DVB_S2_Quad_Tuner_TV_Card working fine for over a year now on debian with 40+ channels decrypted with 2x http://www.tbsdtv.com/products/tbs3102-5-crystal-phoenix-card-reader.html

no hiccups on i7-4820k

PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
20 0 60092 42140 1704 S 46.6 0.3 69:37.45 astra-4.0

K Shea

I'll second the TBS6985 that alf alfonsius mentioned, but be aware of two things:

First, for some reason TVHeadEnd generally sees the TBS6985 adapter inputs in reverse order. So what it considers adapter0 is tuner D, adapter1 is tuner C, adapter2 is tuner B, and adapter3 is tuner A.

Second, the card (and this may apply to all TBS cards) works much more reliably if you force it to use the new style IRQs. The default it to use the old style which can mean that the tuner card shares an IRQ with one or more other, often totally unrelated devices. This can cause strange, seemingly random issues. The fix is simple, and the best explanation I have seen was recently published at http://freetoairamerica.wordpress.com/2014/11/08/do-you-run-one-or-more-tbs-pcie-cards-under-linux-check-your-irqs/

Until I made the above fix I had problems with recordings appearing to be the wrong length in XBMC, even though the entire program had been recorded, and having issues skipping forward and backward. Since I found the above article and made the change shown there, I've had no problems with recordings. YMMV.

Kaya Saman

Thanks for the information :-)

I just purchased a TBS6281 DVB-T/T2/C card. What is strange with this is that it isn't detected by my system at all... nothing in dmesg, nothing in lspci.

Wonder if the h/w is defective?? It's a brand new card though. I tried swapping the slots and even removed my wifi card but unfortunately still it's not detected. :(

Will have to contact my vendor come Monday and see what's going on with it; however if I can it working I might very well consider getting the S/S2 variant in addition.

Kaya Saman

Ok, well here's the good news..

[quote]
Second, the card (and this may apply to all TBS cards) works much more reliably if you force it to use the new style IRQs. The default it to use the old style which can mean that the tuner card shares an IRQ with one or more other, often totally unrelated devices. This can cause strange, seemingly random issues. The fix is simple, and the best explanation I have seen was recently published at http://freetoairamerica.wordpress.com/2014/11/08/do-you-run-one-or-more-tbs-pcie-cards-under-linux-check-your-irqs/

[/quote]

I managed to get the card to register finally; it was a matter of either: disabling the "OPROM" on the slot or allowing "non-compliant devices". Those were the two options I changed in the BIOS (SuperMicro MB) and now all is good.

Will be contacting my vendor soon about this card: http://www.tbsdtv.com/products/tbs6991se-dvb-s2-dual-tuner-dual-ci-pcie-card.html

- model TBS6991SE

Rob D

A note about MB compatibility with the TBS 6985, the later V2 PCB uses a more "compliant" bridge chip and seems to work better with Supermicro, Asus and Tyan boards in general (With older revision they do not seem to detect the card at all).