Media Center card/cam info please

RR7

Hi guys, i'm new here so i hope i'm asking right.


i'm looking to build a media center pc which i can use to view my freeview as well as polish channels on hotbird. the freeview part seems quite easy, but i have a question or two about the sat tuner i'm hoping someone can answer

which digital satellite PCI (or indeed PCI-E) card can i use that will allow me to use some form of CAM, so i can use a viewing card to see the polish channels?

and which CAM should to go with it? (i need nagravision of mediaguard 2..either should suffice)

if there is any modules you can recommend, that'd be great. i'd be using the standard media center software (with whatever codecs i needed installed)

all help appreciated! thanks

Begtets

You'd need to specify which specific channels to get a good answer on the CAM's.
You may be able to watch your channels using a CAM emulator (vplug etc) and decode the signal using software, not an actual card.
MS MCE can only deal with one DVB card type, so won't be able to run DVB-T and DVB-S using MCE native interface.
There are plugins for some viewers like _http://www.dvbportal.de/ but they're all a bit basic tbh.
FWIW I use a Technisat SkyStar2 card because they have wide support and it was damn cheap (£30).

RR7

cheers for the reply

channels in question are specifacally the TVN channels on cyfra+ (hotbird) which is mediaguard 2. The same channels are also available on cyfrowy polsat package, which is nagravision i believe.

now, a viewing card itself is not a problem, i can get a genuine paid-for real one. what i dont want, is about 50 million brown units under my TV. i'm not trying to pirate anything (i really dont want the hassle it involves), i just want a neat little DVR unit that i can use to watch everything

i've managed to find out that some DVB-S cards support a softcam, but with a generic GEMPlus style card reader, so you can use the viewing card with them. do you know if the skystar can support such a thing?

ididnt know about the DVB limitation on MCE though, it's a bit of a bummer. however, i'm prepared to give MythTV a go....if i really have to. does Vista have the same limitation of MCE 2005?