DVB Tuner cards for PC recommendations?

[Maggi]

by all means avoid external USB boxes !!!!!!!1!!!one!!1!

[uberlad]

Worry not. I am avoiding USB parts like the plague.

Plan has changed slightly today as Scan (www.scan.co.uk) has got everything but the case either in TodayOnly special offer or in stock.

Changes are:

Maxtor DiamondMax 10 200GB SATA (anyone seen a review mentioning noise?)
Sony 16x16 Dual Layer Burner
Hauppage WinTV Nova-DVB-t MCE edition (as the twinham one is out of stock and hauppage seems to work ok on Linux)
Micrsoft MCE remote control.

I have decided to try out a MSDN copy of XP MCE for the perfectly legal couple of months alongside a Linux installation of MythTV (probably). If windows wins I'll have to pick up a copy of it then.

Uberlad

[Maggi]

sounds good

most likely the card is developed by Technotrend.

At least all DVB cards from Hauppauge that I came accross were built in license to Technotrend and therefore I presume, you'll find the most recent drivers here:

http://www.technotrend.de/english/download/download.html

Usually it took Hauppauge a few weeks to tweak those before they released them on their own, but in fact the drivers were always identical, so all Hauppauge did was customizing the GUI for matching their coporate ID ...

Just scroll down to the very bottom on that page to find the TT-PCline budget family

[uberlad]

Eeeeexcellent. All I need are the drivers as in both cases I'm using a different app for actually displaying TV.

The prices are fixed until the end of sunday now so I'll probabaly order then - see if anyone wants to have their two pennysworth on the plan.

Uberlad

[Maggi]

I just cross checked and Hauppauge seems to be two months behind with their drivers ...

http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/support/support_mce.html

[Fat Tone]

I'm a bit limited to suppliers (as things have to be ordered through people already on the system) so Scan and Dabs are my main options. Inmac and Novatech are also possibilities. E-Buyer, Komplett etc are unfortunately ruled out/

I'll go with the Antec Aria case - ta for the heads up.

Not sure of a mobo. I've used the A7N8X-VM-400 a few times, and it has a good TV-out bundled, but no external spdif. Are there any uATX boards with both?

I'll go PATA to avoid SATA driver disc problems, probably 200GB.

Will probably go for the NEC ND3540A DVDRW simply because I have one and it is 100%!

2*256MB RAM

MS Wireless keyboard/mouse

May add a Radeon 9550 for TV-out.

Have a 802.11g wifi card already

That really only leaves the freeview tuner (due to suppliers) and mobo to decide on.

[gt40]

Have a look at Mytheatre as a s/w solution - it supports almost all cards, has an excellent on screen display, supports the twinhan remote natively, and I found it much more refined, with much more support than progdvb.
most recorded programs I've been able to burn directly to DVD
The only downfall - the legal version costs money, but a trial version is available.
By all means try Progdvb - it's a decent package (I beleive it is also based on the mytheatre core), but mytheatre is a very polished and feature rich package.

[uberlad]

Well everything's ordered and I should start a load of 'I can't get my damned hardware to work' threads in the middle of the week

I am prepared to borrow a usb floppy overnight to install on an SATA drive for the neatness that the cables give me.

What processor were you thinking on that? Surely anything on S754 is single channel RAM anyway and a single stick will be cheaper than a pair (unless you have the pair already of course)

I hope to try out everything that people have suggested. Of course what I'd like is a package that does everything and that can be automatically scheduled to convert recorded programs into xvids overnight. I'm sure that someone must have done that and as usual it's probabaly just a case of searching for it.

As I hope to mostly be using the remote I plumped for a cheaper keyboard / mouse combo. I hope that doesn't turn out to be something I regret.

Uberlad

[Fat Tone]

The a7n8x is SoA, nForce2, so dual-channel. I'll prolly go for a high-end XP or Sempron and underclock.

I need to keep my s/w as simple as possible - if the family have problems using it I'm really gonna get it in the neck

Good luck with yours

[magog]

PART1
=====

Ok, it seems most of you are new to DVB.
Some experience from over 3 years of using DVB-s.

1.) A user who want's to record/watch with the card only a few times a month and has a fast machine:
-use ProgDVB
-a cheap DVB-s card (buget card) with no MPEG decoder


2.) A user who wan't to record/watch with the card only a few times a month but has a slow machine:
-use ProgDVB
-get a full-featured DVB-s card (full-featured = card has MPEG decoder built-in)


3) VCR Replacement/power user/user with an old and slow pc somewhere flying around:
-get yourself a full featured DVB-s card (with an MPEG decoder built-in)
-use VDR (Video Disk Recorder) as recording software which is available for Linux.
-there are a lot of existing plugins available for the VDR software (DVD recording plugin,...)

http://www.cadsoft.de/people/kls/vdr/

The german heise verlag (c't magazine) offers a version (Debian Linux+VDR) that's very easy to install.
There is also a distribution called LinVDR which is also using Debian + VDR.

http://linvdr.org/projects/linvdr/index.en.php

4.) I you already have 3.) but want an extra card to record more than one program at the same time you can add a cheap buget card like the "Technisat Skystar2 DVB-s PCI HDTV" card to your full featured card.

Note:
====
Number [3.] can record more than one program if the program is in the same satellite program group - this is only a rarely the case if you really want to record two programs at the same time.

[magog]

PART2
=====
Edit1: Added links to the programs if possible!

Sorry, yesterday evening my DSL connection went down and it didn't work until the next morning.

So here we go...
At least one mentioned it already. The Technotrend DVB card design has been used by Hauppauge, Siemens, Technisat (Skystar 1) and others.
If you want to get a full featured card get one of those.


Tools I use for converting *.vdr to DVD and AVI (DivX):
=====================================
The tools are almost all for windows...

- ProjectX (formerly known as DS.jar) http://www.lucike.info/page_projectx.htm
Java program that can convert the *.vdr stream to MPEG-2 (DVD format).
It can also be used to cut out commercial breaks (this can also be done directly with VDR!).
I allows to split *.vdr into an mpeg vdeo-stream and into a MP2 sound-stream (I use these two separated streams as base to convert the recording to DivX with GordianKnot+CoolEdit+WinAMP+DivX 5.x

-PVAStrumento http://www.offeryn.de/dv.htm
Can be used to fix the stream or to convert the *.vdr to MPEG-2 (DVD format).

-CoolEdit Pro v2.1 http://www.adobe.com/special/product...ntrillium.html
Used to edit the *.wav that I generate with WinAMP from the MP2 file I get from ProjectX.
This step is only used if someone is speaking into the credits (I fade out the sound before that happens).

-GordianKnot http://gordianknot.sourceforge.net/
I use this tool (it's acually a full package of tools + gui frontend) as base frontend to convert and merge the movie (mpeg->divx-avi) + sound (*.wav->*.mp3).

-TMPGEnc DVD Author http://www.pegasys-inc.com/en/product/tda.html
Very easy to use DVD creation tool.

That's all for the moment.
I someone has questions feel free to ask.


I've also one full-featured DVB-s card (Hauppauge DVB-s Rev 1.3; this one has a loop through connector) for sale...including my EPIA M9000 system with case + a 15GB harddrive where VDR is already installed.
I will soon (TM) place it on eBay for sale (shipping only in germany).


This is my new videorecording device (since October 2004):
=======================================
-Pentium M
-DFI-ACP G5-M100N Mainboard (Mini-ITX)
-Technotrend DVB-s Rev 1.5
-...



More pictures can be found here (all from october 2004 when I build the case,...):

http://www.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/~julbts/videorechner/

[Fluff]

http://www.nebula-electronics.com/Downloads/BDA_Drivers.asp

BDA drivers (beta) now available for the Nebula.

[Fat Tone]

OK, so I've decided I'm going for simplicity (for now) and will buy MCE and a Freeview/analogue card. Maybe later I'll mess with an extra card and the 'educational' software.

Looking at mobos: I can't see any (mATX) that come with digital out on the back, they all have headers. Is it easy to find a backplane adaptor that will give me coax and optical?

[uberlad]

Good question. All my stuff arrived yesterday and the Gigabyte mBoard didn't have the digital adapter in the box (as it did in all the review models.....). I'll have to try and source it elsewhere when I get a front room large enough for my surround system.

Real Life interfered with PC building last night, so all the bits are together but no OS in sight yet.

The case is tight, but there are pretty clear areas for air to come through the front panel and past the cpu before being sucked out by the power supply fan. There's about 3mm clearance above the standard Sempron fan before the power supply so reviews were right when they said no fancy heatsinks.

Final plan is to have a 150Gb MCE partition, possibly with some other windows suites installed for testing, and a 50Gb Linux partition running (for a start) MythTV.

If Myth wins out then a rejig will be in order.

Uberlad

[Fat Tone]

How is it for noise?

Scan or Dabs (forget atm) do a couple of Gigabyte spdif modules for a few quid, and say they are quite universal.