Damnation! HD on pc with a card that needs so much cpu power is just a bucket of badly written codecs.
@ yeahman
So you have a little taste of the stuff...
At the moment I have a SS2 + progdb + s2emu and it sucks up between 7 to 15% of my 2.2ghz A64/512ram system. No HD decoding at present as I have my dish pointed at 30ºW, don't really care much for HD as of yet.
Image quality is similar to a HDTV rip, sort of DVD quality on most channels and the sound is great on a 5.1 system. It's all dependent on how good the codecs are and channel compression.
On some channels image quality is a disaster, it gets fuzzy because of motion blur, sports can be a pain. I have tryed a few codecs but couldn't find a fix for it, I guess software decoding only does so much. (If anyone knows how to fix this please let it out)
Also, image quality is very dependent of what gfx card you have if you plan to use the tv-out feature, I find ATI better in this respect. If you use the old style control panel it's even better, it's faster and easier to set things up.
About encryption... With a good softcam + dvb viewer program the SS2 will open channels by the truck load, this is the easiest part of them all. There's plenty of software around, some will work just fine with almost any dvb card. Progdvb is a fine example, you have plenty of working softcams available.
Bottom line hardware decoding is the way to go if you are able to find a good card, cam or no cam.