What is it with the poor quality of DVB-S/S2 cards?

[siliconaudio]

Every single PCI or PCIe DVB-S/S2 card I have ever bought has failed after 12 to 18 months of use.

Some of them have been TwinHan/Azurewave, TBS, Generic. It seems they eventually fail from heat failure. Some of the models that use BGA chips seem to get dry-joints under the chip..

My latest card, a TBS6981 has just died at 13 month old. It went intermittent a couple of days ago and is now dead. My PC won't even see it in device manager any more. My HTPC doesn't have a whole lot of fans, but it is very well ventilated. I have an expensive, high quality, quiet power supply.

I've been building PCs for 20 years and never seen so many failures in other types of device. So what's up with DVB-S cards? Why are they so failure prone? No other components have failed in my HTPC.

I love NextPVR, but with the high failure rate of these cards, I'm almost ready to give up. For all the money I have poured down the drain with these cards, I could have purchased a very nice commercial unit. Is it time to throw the towel in? :mad:

[stustunz]

my hauppauge cards are going fine after about 6 years

Had other brands and they have been shit

[siliconaudio]

Hey stustunz,

Thanks for the info - will look and see what Hauppauge has. I'm after a PCIe dual DVB-S2 card.

[stustunz]

they dont do a twin dvb-s2
from memory

[stustunz]

Why do you need S2?
I didnt think anything was broadcast in that in NZ.

[Jaggy]

My Hauppauge cards (HVR-3000s & HVR-4000s) are also still cranking along fine after quite a number of years.

I don't think they do any dual DVB-S cards either.....

[siliconaudio]

Why do you need S2?
I didnt think anything was broadcast in that in NZ.

When we could get Channel 9, GEM, etc. from Aussie, it was S2 and all in high def. I watched the Aussie channels for about a year, before they went off-line. IntelSat 19 has at least one S2 channel. I don't just watch FreeView. I'm a bit of a Satellite enthusiast and not having S2 capability is a bit of a handicap.

Not all DVB-S2 cards are supported in npvr. The TBS and the Hauppauge are.

Just an update on my faulty TBS card... I emailed their online store and have been told it has a 2 year warranty, so I am going to get it replaced. But I think I will add at least one Hauppauge card to my system so at least I have a useable tuner should things go bad again.

[reven]

i use DVB-S2 for HD channels on sky (sky movies, sports, tv1,2,3).

im using a TBS-6984 (quad tuner), had it about a 1.5 years i suppose... hasnt died on me (obviously), i had loads of BSOD issues with the drivers up until about 6 months ago where i would get a BSOD once a day and had to switch to ubuntu and tvheadend (that was a pita), they finally released drivers that stopped this and have been running it in 4therecord since then without any problems, but just switched back to nextpvr about a month ago (2.5.9 release).

ony card i could find that was a quad tuner dvb-s2