video and tuner card help please...

[canonbeck]

Hello all,

I've been away from these parts for a while. Used to have a GBPVR machine back in the day with a couple of mvp clients.

These days I have a humax pvr and an atv1 running crystalbuntu - both are very good but I'm getting fed up of always switching between devices or re-encoding downloads (the humax is fussy) and this got me thinking...

I have a HP microserver N54L serving as a NAS and running windows 8 (can't remember why). It just works. I started to wonder, if I add a suitable video card and a tuner, could this replace my two existing boxes...?

So, I'd appreciate any advice folks may have on either of these two devices. I took a quick look at buyer and I see a cheap silent 5450 card for 20 quid:

http://www.ebuyer.com/255113-msi-hd-5450...md1gd3h-lp

and a quick search around these parts highlighted the blackgold BGT3602 dual dvb-t2 and dvb-s2

http://shop.blackgold.tv/epages/BT3159.s...ts/BGT3602

This interests me as I have an old sky dish with a quad LNB though I haven't used it for many years. I'm not sure if there is anything worth watching on freesat but when I last looked at it, freeview was the better option...


Anyway, would this lot work in a n54l and give reasonable performance?

Any/all advice appreciated.

Cheers

[Graham]

My advice is to be sure to get a DVB-T2 rather than DVB-T. Blackgold (as you have suggested) is one of about three suppliers for DVB-T2 mentioned in the forum. The others are http://hauppauge.co.uk/site/products/prods.html and http://www.buydvb.net/

All three have their supporters. I have seen nothing to say avoid any one of them. I use a Blackgold even though I got burned by a quad Blackgold that failed after only a year (and which they no longer sell). Anything from a toaster upward will do for recording. You wouldn't be the first around here to use an HP server. I use a Nvidia 210 for HD (1080) playback with no problem and the 210 is about 50 places below (sorted by rank) the 5450 in the chart at http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php.

Plus, are you up to speed on the current client options? Folk are using Raspberry Pi, Samsung DVD players, toasters, steam irons, everything.

[jcjefferies]

You would need to double check the tuner card dimensions are compatible with the Microserver in case there are size limitations. I use DVB-T USB dongles so have not had to dismantle the Microserver to put in a PCIe card. I have been intending to get a DVB-S2 card but there were quite a few reports of the first generation cards getting hot and failing after a couple of years. I have been looking at DVBSKY cards as they are more recent generation and are said to run much cooler.

I also use Nvidia 210 for playback bought as the cheapest way to get HDMI output. Used with a twin Athlon and old Pentium4 clients the processor ran at under 20% playing HD video.

Chris

[martint123]

Yes, I'm using dvb-t2 and dvb-s2 USB devices in a microserver. I did read some worries with overheating BG tuners, but that may be an earlier version.
I did have a Pinnacle dual dvb-t/dvb-s pcie tuner that looked much like dvbsky cards (takeover??) but I couldn't squeeze it into the microserver.
I'd like to get a quad tuner into the microserver as it is always on whereas the main pvr is a powerhungry thing that I send to sleep.