[mythtv-users] viaaccess decoding on netup dual receiver card?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Mon, 17 Feb 2014 12:22:42 +0100, you wrote:

>I've recently received an upgrade smartcard from SFDRS for my DVB-S
>reception, so I thought I would play with getting it to work. Swiss TV
>reception it hasn't been working for me since I switched to MythTV
>about a year ago.  I have a dual-channel DVB-S2 netUP card with two CAM
>slots, pointed to LNBs for Hotbird 13 and Astra 19.2.
>
>I use the same DVB Viaaccess CA module I used with our ancient Nokia
>receiver (where it worked without problems).  I can see SRFinfo (which
>isn't coded), and I have complete EPG data for all the Swiss channels.
>As soon as I try switching to e.g. SRF1 (coded), the mythtv frontend
>balks and exits to the main menu, reporting some or other error. 
>Occasionally I have managed to leave e.g. SRF1 selected with the info
>box showing something like "(_LMSc) partial lock".  
>
>According to info provided by SFDRS, it could take up to 30mins for the
>card to be "activated" so I should leave the receiver tuned to the
>channel. As mythtv doesn't want to do that, I figured I could use
>dvbtune? (hasn't worked sofar though). 
>
>I've tried some of the module options for the cx23885 module to see if
>they would produce more info wrt the decryption, why it isn't working
>etc., but no luck.  The mythbackend logs don't reveal much either.
>
>Any and all hints appreciated! 

If your card works like my Videoguard one, it requires "entitlements"
to be written to it for it to work.  These are broadcast continuously
by the provider in one of the digital streams on each multiplex, and
the ones for your card will come by regularly so they can be read and
written to your card.  But you need software that can do that, which
MythTV does not do, and dvbtune also does not do.

In my case, Windows users of DVBViewer here in New Zealand report that
it will handle updating the entitlements for my type of Videoguard
card when it is used in a card reader with Oscam and DVBViewer, but I
do not know of any software for Linux that can do this.  So what I do
is take my card out of the reader I have it in normally and put it
back in my provider's set-top box for a few hours every so often, so
it can get the entitlements written to it.  Then I put it back in my
card reader again and it will keep working for up to about a month (I
pay monthly) before it needs to have it done again.

In theory, your CA module, if it is a smart one and has the right
firmware, could do the entitlement updating as long as the tuner it is
one is tuned to a multiplex that is broadcasting the entitlements.  So
it might be worthwhile checking if there is firmware that can do that
for you.  Otherwise you will probably need to do what I am doing.

Unfortunately, DVBViewer is not open source, otherwise I could have a
look at how it does the entitlement updating and have a look at making
that work with MythTV.