Compro Videomate S350 DVB-S

[DanielP]

I bought this DVB-S card for about £25 as a gamble (I am on a tight budget and can't afford to go all Hauppauge!). It's all up and running perfectly- I had to add the entry to the bda.ini and download the latest drivers, however. Even better, it features a pass through to the ATX power button, which means that you can use the remote control to start the PC- I trained the "TV" button on my MCE remote to emulate this, as the supplied Compro remote does not work with GBPVR.

I'm left wondering what the catch is (apart from lack of Diseqc) and why the card is so cheap in comparison to the Hauppauge cards?

Daniel

[sub]

Can you post the bda.ini entry so I can add it to the master bda.ini?

[DanielP]

[VideoMate DVB-S DVBS Tuner]
TUNING_TYPE=DVB-S
FILTER_TUNER=VideoMate DVB-S DVBS Tuner
FILTER_CAPTURE=VideoMate DVB-S Digital Capture
PIN_TUNER_IN=Input0
PIN_TUNER_OUT=MPEG2-Transport
PIN_CAPTURE_IN=MPEG2-Transport
PIN_CAPTURE_OUT=MPEG2-Transport

Sorry about the delay. Just got my new sat dish in + adjusted- I now have all the Astra1 and Hotbird based free channels setup with GBPVR as well as the FTA UK ones on astra2. I am in nerd heaven, though my wife won't talk to me re: the 80cm dish I bought! Well, she said she wanted Eurosport without paying for sky.

Daniel

[sub]

Cheers.

[Bathman]

DanielP

How is this card doing. I thinking of getting one as they are cheap. How fast is channel changing with it

[DanielP]

Hi,

Seems fine to me. Channel changing OK- picture quality seems OK....probably can't use DISEQC (haven't tried though). Occasionally, I get a no signal error- go back out + come back in and it's OK. Had a few missed recordings, but this might be because of my multi card setup.

It's not my major machine though, so I don't rely on it. I think that it should do the job though- for £25, you can't complain!

Daniel

[DanielP]

Oh dear! That'll teach me! My Compro seems to have died (or it isn't powering the LNB at least). I was going to buy another one anyway, so I have done that. I'll swap it out and see if it the card or another problem. I may have fried it accidently when fiddling around with cables (not being careful with the 12v line power).

So- works fine, but longevity may be a problem!

I'll report back.

Daniel

[DanielP]

Got my new Compro s350 and I'm back up and running.

I'm not totally sure why the first one died but I think it was my fault- I was swapping sat cables around with the machine up and I think I might have fried it with the 12v cable current when I accidently shorted out some wires.

The new Compro is going great, especially now I have upgraded from the gf6200 (which was great for the price) to the gf7600gs. The S-video output is well crisp and actually miles better than the Rad2400pro I have on my main TV. I'm glad I'm still running CRTs!!

I would thoroughly recommend the Compro, especially if you want to play around and only have a tight budget (my new one was £29:50 incl vat + p&p). The drivers were also less accident prone than those on my Hauppauge Nova S+, believe it or not!!

Daniel

[martint123]

Hi Daniel, could you give me some clues how you got yours working?

I recently acquired one at their bargain basement price and have got it working with progdvb, DVBDream and their own software. No luck with gbpvr as yet though.
It goes through the scans and finds 100's of channels, but there is no preview, ID's are all "unknown". I picked one transponder and mapped the found channels to dummy EPG entries but nothing. I'm not too familiar with the technicalities of DVB but comparing with lyngsat, the data in the can file in the BDA directory the PIDs or whatever don't look right.
Any chance of a copy of your scan file to give it a try?

Martin
(testing by recording BBC HD with DVBDream and playing via video library - at around 1MB per second)

[martint123]

Update: Found someones scan cache file on here, loaded it and back into config.
The small preview window now has an image and I can map channels and they work.
So it would appear to be a scanning hickup as it would appear to be able to tune channels for normal use.