How to set up NextPVR in the UK

[Ecg]

I would really appreciate some help with this! I recently bought a DVBSky S952 DVB-S2 dual tuner with the intention of building my own media server. I struggled through several days of trying to get this thing to work in Ubuntu through various unrelated hardware failures and incompatibilities, and although I got it installed as a device, couldn't seem to get MythTV set up to receive a broadcast.

I decided to switch to Windows which I'm much more familiar with just to try and get started. My card drivers are installed, I've attached the cable which feeds the signal to my current Freesat set top box (also dual tuner - works fine with a single feed and a pass thru cable) and at this stage, all I want to do is to find out whether the damn card works! I've tried scanning 28.2 ASTRA 2, EUROBIRD 1 (28.2 E) and it picks up just a few channels, but if I try to view Live TV on any of them, I just get a black screen. No OSD, just black. I've seen some posts from other people with a similar problem but they seem to be able to record and then watch the recording - playing back a recording for me also gives a black screen.

I've basically been going round in circles with this for so long, I have no idea what I'm doing any more and I would be so grateful if someone could give me a quick idea of how to set NextPVR up to receive UK freesat channels. If I know I'm going in the right direction, I can eliminate user stupidity from the equation and concentrate on possible hardware issues.

It seems as though if my set top box gets a reasonable signal, this card should be able to as well, or is that not the case? If someone can just give me an overview of what to put in the 'Digital Recorder Settings' dialogue box to pick up UK channels, that would be really helpful.

I'm sure I must be missing something really fundamental here but I just don't know where to go with this any more!

Thanks for reading!

*Edit - log files added

[Ecg]

Nothing will guarantee you fix a problem yourself more than posting to a forum about it! I don't entirely know what I did, but virtually the next thing I tried after posting this message got the thing working. Thank you to any readers, and I still think country based step-by-step guides would be useful. If I end up using NextPVR, maybe I'll do one.

[Zeb]

Your logs showed a very weak signal and no channel lock. I'm glad you solved the problem whatever it was! Post again if you encounter more problems.

[Ecg]

Thanks for your reply - that's good information to have. I think I may have had something running in the background that was stealing all the signal.

[martint123]

I'm not convinced that your single feed with passthrough is a good idea. Signals/voltages are sent up the cable to tell the LNB about polarisation and hi/lo band. SO two devices on the same LNB port can conflict. It is possible that your device with passthrough (freeview box??) is passing the signal downstream but not controlling signals upstream.

[Ecg]

Thanks for the reply. You may well be right about the passthrough configuration, but it's one suggested by the manufacturer (it's a Humax Foxsat PVR set-top box) so I can only assume that their hardware is set up to cope with it.

[fuzzweed]

I install satellite cabling and in my experience it's always one feed/LNB per tuner. i.e. sky+ (twin tuner) has twin LNB at the dish and two feeds. Two, separate, single tuner boxes (i.e. set top box, and pc card)= twin LNb and two feeds, and two sky+ boxes = quad lNB and 4 feeds. I don't know your specific hardware but I'd be surprised if a pass through between two bits of kit would work very well.

[martint123]

You have only a limited choice as to what can be tuned on the second channel. Also if the polarisation or band is changed on the first tuner then you will lose what the second one is viewing.
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthrea...on+one+lnb