Freeview or Freesat Recommendations Gratefully Received

[Lao Pan]

I have been using GBPVR / NPVR for the last 4 years with a dual tuner Compro DVB-T PCI-E card and for the last year and a bit a DVB-T2 dongle for Freeview HD, all with great success.

On the house we now live in there is a sky dish with dual feed to the living room and I would like to get a sat card for freesat + some of the free to air other channels - Phoenix for one.

Motherboard has 1 PCI-E socket (Compro Card) and 2 PCI sockets (Free)

Would you recommend Swapping the Compro DVB-T for a Dual TDS Sat card or just getting a single PCI TDS Sat card for now possibly going to two cards later.

Thoughts Gratefully Received

[imilne]

If you go Freesat, you'll get *almost* all of the channels that are on Freeview anyway (and plenty of others that aren't), and you'll have an easier time of it with HD stuff too as they use Dolby Digital rather than AAC.

I'd be willing to bet that the Freeview exclusive channels (Dave, Yesterday, Challenge, etc) are ones that you wouldn't be recording from most of the time, so dropping down to just a single DVB-T tuner shouldn't hurt too much. So if it was me, I'd be getting a 2x DVB-S2 PCIx card for the Freesat stuff, and just keeping the DVB-T2 dongle for the Freeview stuff.

Iain

[Lao Pan]

Thanks Iain
Had thought along similar lines but its always difficult to retire equipment while it still works!
I think I haven't recorded anything off Dave since the World Rally Championship in 2010 - After which it went to ESPN and of course I will Still have the Freeview HD dongle.
And thanks for your plugins Just reinstalled System, Autorefresh & Reclockornot on Vista after a well overdue Killdisk session

[chunkymonkey909]

When I had a freesat card a couple of years ago the only downside was that they kept changing the frequencies of the channels and I had to do a rescan which was a pain with the old GBPVR.

[imilne]

That still happens, but mainly with the 'rubbish' channels tbh and it's not very often even then. Also, so long as they don't change transponder NPVR can deal with it automatically, which is something GBPVR couldn't do.

Iain