Recommend Hardware

Adam Sutton · 2012-08-21T15:10:14+00:00

I've created a wiki page [[DVBCards]] to make a note about known working cards, and peoples general thoughts etc... So far it only include [[TBS6981]] as th...

Gert Jansen

I have 4 TVHeadend machines.

1 Raspberry Pi 2 running Raspbian (Jessie) with a DVBSky S860 (DVB-S2)

3 Virtual Machines on my ESXi server, all running Linux Debian (Jessie)
To these VMs I pass the following USB devices (1 receiver for each VM)
* another DVSKy S860 (DVB-S2) - could as well be a S960, they look similar
* a TBS 5980 QBOX CI (DVB-S2)
* a Terratec H7 (DVB-C)

All of them are working perfectly fine.

Craig Sutherland

After a long love hate relationship with a TBS-MOI-S2, I have a really stable rig consisting of

Megasat 2 (SAT>IP) box mounted in a weather proof gland box on the roof, connected over TP-LINK Power to Ethernet converters, to TVHeadend (Jessie) running on a dedicated Raspberry Pi 3, running 4.0.95.

Then Kodi clients on Openelec 6.0.3 also on Raspberry Pi.

The trick to making the Megasat 2 happy was ensure "Disable device-/firmware-specific workarounds:" is ticked. If you don't do this you will get no free adapter messages and TVH refuses to tune channels.

I'm tempted to try 4.1 but it seems so stable, I'm reluctant to move.

cab guy

wondered if anyone had tried these cheapo little things http://www.gearbest.com/networking-communication/pp_275300.html £20 is cheap
<<

Anders Gustafsson

I guess a plain vanilla USB tuner is cheaper still, unless you absolutely need to plug it into an android phone?

Maury Markowitz

It looks like kWorld is out of the tuner business. Their Japanese and English websites only list some headphones now.

Deli Vereath

I'm looking for a DVB-S2 -> IPTV setup using 2x quattro LNB + multiswitch. I would like to serve 6 simultaneous users and would need transcoding. And recommendation of a power efficient setup ? I don't want to have a 140W Xeon doing software transcoding.

Any chance to have a dual USB DVB-S2 tuner and Raspberry 3 doing live h264 transcoding on HD channels ?

Otherwise, should I go for a x86 setup with GPU transcoding ?

Jan Kowalski

At this time the best USB dongle is Geniatech T230 which you can buy on ebay for couple bucks. Is working with DVB-C/T/S with new LibreELEC 8.0

Deli Vereath

I'm looking for a DVB-S2 tuner not DVB-C/T.

Has anyone tested Geniatech X9320 ? Quite cheap for a 4 tuner DVB-S2 pci-e : goo.gl/GLXjxW

T C

Jan Kowalski wrote:
> At this time the best USB dongle is Geniatech T230 which you can buy on ebay for couple bucks.
But watch out tonot get the new T230C

Jan Kowalski

T C wrote:

> But watch out tonot get the new T230C

I have T230C and working very good :) drivers for this T230C are included in new Libreelec 8.0

HoRhE HoRhE

Im interested in hardware but from CPU (PC) point of view:

What PC CPU should I get to receive (operate the receiver DVB-S2 or DVB-T), transcode to H.264 low bitrate and stream

through internet or record to HD different number of channels ?

I going to shop for CPU and memory...can somebody tell me what an Intel i3,i5 etc can do in the above terms ?

What about memory ?

Lets say I want to handle 10 SD and 5 HD DVB-T and as much HD DVB-S2 I can get at the same time with a dual DVB-S2 card

Forget the DVB cards...what (minimum) CPU should I get ?

Another question DVB related I dont know if it can be answered here (all cards will be handled by tvheadend so its related somehow):
From experience with a Dreambox (single tuner) I know that i can watch 1 channel and record another if
they are on same transponder...
Is it the same with DVB-S2 cards on PC ? Is 2 the limit or I can receive more channels on same transponder ?

I want to find out the maximin channels I can receive with a dual or quad DVB-S2 card...

What about DVB-T cards ? Are there "tranponders" there as well ? How many different channels can I receive with

a single tuner ?

Thank you

Anders Gustafsson

For DVB-T and DVB-C, channels are sent in bundles of usually four. That means that you can (in theory) record four diferent programmes, as long as they happen to be on the same bundle (sometimes called MUX).

I have a ASUS Z97-P LGA1150 with an Intel Celeron G1840 - 2.8 GHz with 3x1Tb configured as RAID-5, which leaves 2Tb useable for recording. Two DVB-C tuners, two DVB-T.

Three of the tuners are cheap ones from ebay. The last id an really expensive one and it has been the most problematic :)

Kev S

Re the number of services on a DVB-T/T2 multiplex, it depends on the country - in the UK some multiplexes have more than 12 TV channels on air at once. I can receive 160 channels across 9 multiplexes, of which around 100 are TV stations with around 80 on air at any one time (the rest being radio stations, pointers to online channels, and interactive services). I've been able to record 12 TV channels simultaneously on the one tuner.

Anders Gustafsson

True, it would depend entirely on the bandwidth used for each service. The lower the bandwidth, the more channels you can squeeze into one frequency.

mpmc

Anders Gustafsson wrote:

> True, it would depend entirely on the bandwidth used for each service.The lower the bandwidth, the more channels you hac squeeze into one t´frequency.

That also means the picture quality looks worse than 240p on Youtube :p

Anders Gustafsson

True. Four channels on a 150MHz carrier seems to be a reasonable compromise. Dunno about SAT as I have never had the need.

HoRhE HoRhE

Ok...u say u have better results with cheap ebay usb tuners than expensive ones...i was going to go for a $200 twin usb tuner to have a piece of mind...which is the cheap ebay one that does the same for little money ?

Also can u suggest a cheap working quad dvbs2 and dvbt/t2 pcie for pc based solution ?

U say u use 2 dvbs and 2 dvbt with a celeron...ok but HOW MANY channels are you transcoding ? Simultaneously...

Thank you

Anders Gustafsson

For my initial tries, I bought a PCTV tripleStick (292e) that cost me 100€, so far, that has been the by far most problematic one :)

http://blog.palosaari.fi/2014/04/naked-hardware-15-pctv-triplestick-292e.html

I later bought one of these for DVB C:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Dongle-DVB-T2-DVB-T-DVB-C-FM-DAB-Digital-HDTV-Stick-Tuner-Receive-SN-/161786021963?hash=item25ab32c84b:g:BD4AAOSwd0BVwxa9

And I also have two of this for DVB-T:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/DVB-T-DAB-FM-Radio-Realtek-RTL2832U-R820T-software-defined-SDR-HDTVwbGT15-/321652321738?hash=item4ae3f8edca:g:yEMAAOSwWKtUxoHg

What is important is the chipset and that you make sure you have the latest firmware for that chipset.

Not sure what you mean by "transcoding", I know what it means, but I do not deliberately change the format of anything. I just record and watch on my Raspberry. We never watch more than one recording at the same time, but we might record several programmes simultaneously. I have never checked how many in reality. IIRC have i forced two or three at the same time, just to make sure that it does indeed select the next free tuner.

HoRhE HoRhE

Ok lets forget transcoding...my platform is odroid xu4 sbc which should be able to transcode at least one channel im happy with that...its OS is ubuntu 16.04 LTS will it support the cheap (10 euro) you suggest ?
What advantages do you think this one will have (if any)

http://shop.tbsdtv.com/tbs5220-usb-dvbt2-t-c-tuner-tv-stick-p-87.html

...i dont need DVB-C and im not sure if my tv provider (www.digea.gr) is dvb-t or dvb-t2...is
there any way to know how many of the 10 channels the provider is broadcasting will i receive on a single tuner (lets say the 10 euro one u proposed)
The provider has 5 HD channels...is this what dvb-t2 is about ? If yes i dont care because they are broadcasting in SD too at a seperate channel...

Anders Gustafsson

I cannot say anything about that stick. It does not say what chipset it uses and that is all that matters. Also, if you do not need DVB-C (ie cable) and only DVB-T, (Terrestrial) then there is no need whatsoever to buy a DVB-C capable stick.

I checked the webpage, but I am afraid it is all Greek to me :) and the English pages mostly had "Content in this section will soon be available."

When I googled, I got the impression that they have four (4) channels per frequency, ie same as here. That means that you can record or view a maximum of four channels simultaneously, provided they are all on the same frequency/bundle/mux (can be called various things) I suggest you contact them and ask what frequencies they tranmit on in your area and what channels are on each frequency.

https://sites.google.com/site/zliangas/digea

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