Adam792
Specialist Contributor
- My Satellite Setup
- 90cm Corab dish, TM-2300 motor, TBS6903X, TBS5930 Lite, Octagon SF8008 mini
- My Location
- Cheltenham
Just thought I'd share my latest set-up.
I decided last year to move away from Enigma boxes, as I've always been slightly dissatisfied with the user experience on them. A lot of decent boxes exist but they're just not pleasant for watching and recording TV.
I looked into Kodi Media Centre (XBMC as was), and found out about the support for live TV via software like TVHeadend. My first dip into this was to set up an old mini PC I had lying around as a Freeview HD box with XBMC, TVHeadend and a PCTV Nano 290e USB DVB-T2 stick. This worked out pretty decently, and made me want to see if I could get all my satellite stuff on a similar set-up.
I ended up building a modest PC, Intel i3 processor, micro ATX motherboard (I would have gone smaller even but I needed more than 1 PCI-E slot for tuner cards as well as graphics), a DVBSky dual tuner DVB-S2 PCI-E card, and an nVidia GT630 graphics card (decent enough spec to handle full hardware decode of MPEG4 1080i50 with the best hardware supported deinterlacing and scaling methods). As I have a French BIS Télévisions card for 13°E, I also bought an Argolis Smargo USB card reader.
Since moving house, my set-up consists of an 80cm dish with monoblock for 13°E/19.2°E, plus the ubiquitous zone 1 minidish on 28.2°E left by the previous owners! The two dishes look like they overlap a little but I've not seen any signal degradation compared to when I've taken the minidish down, so it can stay as is as far as I'm concerned!
The set-up of the media centre PC itself has been a bit more tricky. The drivers for my DVBSky S2 card (s952) are fiddly with Linux; it's not properly supported in the kernel, and the third party versions from DVBSky themselves break support for my DVB-T2 USB stick (so I can't have terrestrial as well for now).
TVHeadend takes a bit of setting up as there are lots of options, but it's very powerful software and once you have everything as you want it it works very well. I use the nightly unstable version 3.9 builds as the older stable 3.4 version isn't good if you have lots of channels in the list (which is going to happen with several satellites tuned in!) For UK channels on 28.2°E, it can pull through the regional Freesat bouquet of your choice with channel numbers and over the air EPG all working very well. For the French BIS channels that only have over the air now and next EPG, with a bit of setting up XMLTV works very well to provide a full guide.
The Smargo cardreader was surprisingly easy to get working, being read by OSCam compiled for Ubuntu. I was able to tweak the config files I used in Enigma 2 just to work with the smartreader protocol, and it reads the BIS card fine. TVHeadend interfaces with OSCam via either newcamd or DVBAPI, but for me newcamd seems to work best. I also have TVHeadend connected via newcamd to DOSCAM running on a Raspberry Pi for Swiss and Austrian channels via emulator.
Kodi itself is fairly easy to get set-up once you've found the options to get the refresh rate to 50Hz and make sure the video is going through the best hardware decoding settings. Picture quality is very good, much better than Enigma 2 on both SD and HD channels, and the EPG works very nicely!
Dish cabling needs tidying up but I'm looking to replace the cable from the monoblock with shotgun cable for two feeds.
I decided last year to move away from Enigma boxes, as I've always been slightly dissatisfied with the user experience on them. A lot of decent boxes exist but they're just not pleasant for watching and recording TV.
I looked into Kodi Media Centre (XBMC as was), and found out about the support for live TV via software like TVHeadend. My first dip into this was to set up an old mini PC I had lying around as a Freeview HD box with XBMC, TVHeadend and a PCTV Nano 290e USB DVB-T2 stick. This worked out pretty decently, and made me want to see if I could get all my satellite stuff on a similar set-up.
I ended up building a modest PC, Intel i3 processor, micro ATX motherboard (I would have gone smaller even but I needed more than 1 PCI-E slot for tuner cards as well as graphics), a DVBSky dual tuner DVB-S2 PCI-E card, and an nVidia GT630 graphics card (decent enough spec to handle full hardware decode of MPEG4 1080i50 with the best hardware supported deinterlacing and scaling methods). As I have a French BIS Télévisions card for 13°E, I also bought an Argolis Smargo USB card reader.
Since moving house, my set-up consists of an 80cm dish with monoblock for 13°E/19.2°E, plus the ubiquitous zone 1 minidish on 28.2°E left by the previous owners! The two dishes look like they overlap a little but I've not seen any signal degradation compared to when I've taken the minidish down, so it can stay as is as far as I'm concerned!
The set-up of the media centre PC itself has been a bit more tricky. The drivers for my DVBSky S2 card (s952) are fiddly with Linux; it's not properly supported in the kernel, and the third party versions from DVBSky themselves break support for my DVB-T2 USB stick (so I can't have terrestrial as well for now).
TVHeadend takes a bit of setting up as there are lots of options, but it's very powerful software and once you have everything as you want it it works very well. I use the nightly unstable version 3.9 builds as the older stable 3.4 version isn't good if you have lots of channels in the list (which is going to happen with several satellites tuned in!) For UK channels on 28.2°E, it can pull through the regional Freesat bouquet of your choice with channel numbers and over the air EPG all working very well. For the French BIS channels that only have over the air now and next EPG, with a bit of setting up XMLTV works very well to provide a full guide.
The Smargo cardreader was surprisingly easy to get working, being read by OSCam compiled for Ubuntu. I was able to tweak the config files I used in Enigma 2 just to work with the smartreader protocol, and it reads the BIS card fine. TVHeadend interfaces with OSCam via either newcamd or DVBAPI, but for me newcamd seems to work best. I also have TVHeadend connected via newcamd to DOSCAM running on a Raspberry Pi for Swiss and Austrian channels via emulator.
Kodi itself is fairly easy to get set-up once you've found the options to get the refresh rate to 50Hz and make sure the video is going through the best hardware decoding settings. Picture quality is very good, much better than Enigma 2 on both SD and HD channels, and the EPG works very nicely!
Dish cabling needs tidying up but I'm looking to replace the cable from the monoblock with shotgun cable for two feeds.
In a couple of years they should be a bit easier to receive as a move to DVB-S2 T2-MI has been hinted at (they did tests using this a year or so ago on 30°W).
