Freesat HD

[liteswap]

I'm toying with going the Freesat route, since I can't get anything other than four analogue terrestrial channels where I live.

I've searched the forum and come up with these potential gotchas:
1. Getting a dish installed
2. EPG - is one available?
3. CPU - will I need to upgrade the PVR (see sig for current setup)?
4. Simultaneous recording/viewing - excuse the stupid q but can one DB-S receiver enable simultaneous channel reception, or is it like analogue, where I need one receiver per recording?

Thanks in advance all.

[BigMoose]

1. Yes, you need one of these. There are independent satelitte/arial installers who'd do it for you, or get a sat finder from Maplins (not very expensive) and have a go yourself. I personally find alligning the dish a pain in the arse so paid someone to sort mine out when I had a DTT arial installed.

2. Yup - free one using xmltv/xmltvgui from the Radiotimes

3. I'd say you'd need an upgrade. I've got a dual core 2.4Ghz 45w AMD cpu and it copes fine - download the trial of CoreAVC and see if you can find some H264 1080i content and see how well your current CPU copes. Either that or get a graphics card with hardware accelleration - although relying on hw H264 has proved problematic for some.

4. A dvb-s reciever can receive one mux at a time, so it is possible to watch/record multiple channels but only off the same mux - with my Freesat GBPVR setup I've not got this working, but mainly cause I've not put much effort into sorting some problems. For complete flexibility for multiple channels then yes multiple receivers would be needed.

As a free HD fully functional PVR, I am very pleased with my GBPVR setup. the HD side took a fair bit of tweeking although that said my recent reinstall has solved many issued I was having with BBC/ITV HD. Hope that helps.

[liteswap]

Many thanks - I think you've answered my questions. I currently use the RT XML feed for the analogue setup but I wasn't sure if that covered all the bases for the added sat channels.

From a hardware perspective, it looks like I'm into a root-and-branch upgrade. Hope the Antec box the system's currently squeezed into can cope with any extra heat from a higher-powered CPU....

All I now need to do is persuade my OH that we really do now need an ugly sat dish hanging off the house...

[Pob]

A good-value way to get a dish installed is to buy one of the Sky free for life packs from Currys etc. For £75 you get the dish installed, a standard Sky box, and a SKy viewing card. Plus you get 4-months free trial of the not-free channels like Sky One, discovery etc. So long as you remember to ring after 3 months to cancel the trial channels, there are no monthly charges to pay and you can carry on using the box for all the free-to-view content.
Downside is that the installer will only run one cable into your house. If you want to record one sat channel and watch another, you will need at least a dual LNB & cables. I asked the Sky installer to fit a quad LNB 'for future upgrade to SKy+' and he had no problem with this - but I still had to clamber up a ladder to install the three extra cables.
Shops selling Freesat boxes, like Argos, also do a one-off price for Sat dish installation - about £80 - but you get no set-top-box, so the Sky deal still seems better value.

[liteswap]

Umm, thanks for complicating my decision-making process

I'm not sure I'm too fussed about whether or not I get a STB as I'm just going to route the cable into the PVR (obviously!), and I won't be paying any money to Sky - that's for sure. I suppose I could always flog the box on eBay...

I'm more concerned about the non-standard installation I want: I live in a conservation area, so I don't want the dish just nailed to the most convenient outside wall, but placed in a particular position on the side of a chimney where it's invisible from the front of the house. It's way high, and I'm not sure the average installer would have a ladder that long...

I'd also want a twin (at least) LNB - but a bit of sniffing around suggests that you can buy multi-core co-ax cable, which would mean just the one cable to be run into the house.

Question is, would the Sky installer do this - presumably I'd have to slip him a bob or two?

[Dave_M]

Sorry to make things more complicated, but I think you can make it work without upgrading your CPU. It would be a much cheaper experiment to try hardware acceleration than upgrade your system.

Here's an example of how to get HD playback on a lowly intel atom cpu... http://www.guru3d.com/article/accelerate...pu-guide/1

[Elmo Putney]

I live in a conservation area

Have you seen these:

http://www.rapidtvnews.com/index.php/200...-dish.html

[DanielP]

See if you can bung an ATI HD3450 graphics card in. It's very cheap and accelerates everything.

My single core Athlon 64 systems handles most HD- BBC and ITV are flawless- Blu-ray is also OK, though not perfect (a bit of judder with horizontal panning)- however I am stuck with an old version of PowerDVD because of all the content protextion nonsense. I can also get the Euro DVB-S2 channels like ARTE.

As far as sat systems, you can get everything you need to install youself if necessary from Maplin. Smaller dishes are very cheap and finding the signal is quite easy- connect up the sat finder, point South, move East- the first loud signal you find will be German TV on Astra 1, the second loud signal will be the UK stuff. It is also possible to connect up cables without drilling through the wall- you can get special flat cable sections that you close into a window. Genius!

If you live in a conservation area try this as an alternative to a sat dish:

http://www.sqish.co.uk/

Daniel

[liteswap]

Sorry to make things more complicated, but I think you can make it work without upgrading your CPU. It would be a much cheaper experiment to try hardware acceleration than upgrade your system.

Here's an example of how to get HD playback on a lowly intel atom cpu... http://www.guru3d.com/article/accelerate...pu-guide/1

That sounds amazing - and would only require a upgrade of my nVidia 7600GS. I tried it out and using the Matroska filter lowered CPU usage - but can that be done inside GBVR? The article sems to suggest it works ony with the tweaked media player.Anyone else got this working?

[liteswap]

Looks intetesting - if pricey. I think I might get away with mounting a 60cm dish high on a chimney but behind the roof ridge so it's not visible from the road.

Next trick is to figure out if there's a way of making use of a STB since they're effectively giving them away, it makes me wonder if they can be hacked and routed into the PC, saving the cost of buying a DVB-S(2) card....