Receiving satellite signals in the UK

[JamesR]

Hi,
I'm a newbie to all things PVR and am currently spec'ing out a box to build my own.
I understand that GB-PVR can accommodate a DVB-S card, but my question is can in handle encrypted channels or just the FTA ones? Is there anybody in the UK currently using GB-PVR with a satellite? And if so, are the any pitfalls that I should be aware of?
Any support is much appreciated. Keep up the great work.

[ricklous]

I dont have a satellite card but im assuming its pretty much the same as dvb terrestial signals, i.e. if it uses BDA drivers then whatever the card itself can encode, it can shove into gbpvr.

On a more specific UK note, the Freesat service (Freeview over satelite) i imagine could be decoded by a dvb-s, but sky is a whole other ballgame, due to being encrypted. a vanilla dvb-s card couldnt decode anything from sky as far as im aware.

Sorry i cant be more precise in my answers.... :-s

[sota]

I am using the Hauppauge Nova S+ card to receive Freeview channels via the Astra satellite. It's not a card I would recommend as it has been a pig to get working, and even now it's fairly unstable. Also, I haven't managed to get the EPG working with it. From what I have read the Twinhan cards are quite good but I have no experience with them.
The new Hauppauge HVR 4000 will have an optional CAM reader for some encrypted channels.

Pat Rooney

[elite]

You should be good on most of the free to air channels, I beleive some (E4, Film 4 etc) are still encrypted...

Sky most likely will not release any kind of decoder for the PC as this would make hacking their encryption a breeze...

The workaround I had to go for was to have a STB feeding GBPVR (I still need to set up some knid of IR blaster to control the STB)

Obviously this could make your setup quite a bit more expensive if you need to record from multiple satellite channels (you will need to have multiple STBs from $KY.

[Bathman]

Where I live in the UK I Cannot receive freeview and analog wise the reception of Channel 4 is poor. I therefore use DVB-S

Initially I used a SKY box and a blaster to change channels. This worked fine but the quality of the picture was very poor. Basically a digital image enters the SKY box lives it as analogue goes through a hauppage 150 card which converts it back to digital onto you hard drive. And if you use a SDTV the data is then converted back to analogue by the graphics card so it can be displayed on your television. The end result in my case was poor picture quality.

Because of this I brought a FloppyDTV DVB-S and the quality of the image is fantastic. Way better then any analogue picture and Freeview because the data rate is so much higher.

As for what channels you can receive well that is a slight problem. The FloppyDTV has a built in CAM and with the appropriate dragon CAM. All SKY channels can be decoded. Unfortunately GBPVR does not support CAM at present (although I do believe it is on Subs to do list).

Thus on my system I use my DVB-S card to receive BBC1,2,3,4,ITV1,2,3,4,Film4,BBC24

and I use a Hauppauge 150 to receive
BBC1,2,ITV1 and Channel 4

This I am unable to receive Five,Five life, Five US.

Personally I would recommend anyone who has a sky dish sitting there doing nothing to get a DVB-S card just for the FTA channels simply because the picture quality is so much better.

[Bathman]

When a do a channel scan I pick up some 435+ channels most of which are utter rubbish golf channel, wedding channel, shopping channels etc. Also I significant proportion are encoded and therefore need CAM support which GBPVR does not support.

However here is a list of some of the FTA channels available in the UK via DVB-S

http://www.wickonline.com/fta.htm

You also pick up some 200 radio channels. Unfortunately GBPVR does not support DVB radio either.

[Bathman]

Also you are not able to pick up the DVB-S EPG data with GBPVR (like you can with Freeview (DVB-T)). Apparently the EPG data is transmitted on a separate stream called OpenTV.

This is not much of a problem for the common channels as you can get the XMLTV data of the web however for some channels this is not the case.

[Bathman]

One other thing that springs to mind is that you use a DVB-S card you can watch the BBC HD broadcasts. About 4 hours every evening.

Certain Match of the Day games (thats football or Soccer to the "septic tanks") are also broadcast.

[peterh]

The TwinHan cards perform well and are well supported. As previously suggested if you already have a sky dish then it'll work for the free channels as is. If you already have sky then it may be woth getting a quad LNB so that you can still use your Sky dish but can record the free channels, If you don't yet have a dish you may want to think about a multi LNB setup to also pick up the Astra1 and hotbird satellites

[happyhammer]

>>You also pick up some 200 radio channels. Unfortunately GBPVR does not >>support DVB radio either

depends, the skystar2 card has the plugin "ssrecorder" which now does radio.


>>One other thing that springs to mind is that you use a DVB-S card you can >>watch the BBC HD broadcasts.

depends, you need a pretty powerful cpu to do this.