[mythtv-users] Looking to switch to FreeSat from FreeView in the UK

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sun, 31 May 2015 22:38:25 +0100, you wrote:

>Hi, I'm currently running Myth 0.27 on OpenSuSE, and am looking at 
>switching from Freeview to Freesat.
>
>I currently have 4 USB DVB-T (Hauppauge WinTV-NOA-T-Stick) tuners and 
>would like to replace them with DVB-S (or maybe DVB-S2) tuners.
>
>Looking at the Wiki, I seem to be limited to a couple of devices:
>
> 1. Turbosight TBS5922/25/80
> 2. Pinnacle PCTV 460/1e
>
>The TurboSight seems to be a more involved device with CAM support etc. 
>and external power. This device seems a little unwieldy, currently my 
>Nova-T  cards need no external power and are stick sized, so I'm not 
>sure I'm keen on switching to something that's apparently so bulky.
>
>Looking on the likes of Amazon, all of the Pinnacle devices available 
>seem to be from Germany with a few warnings about QWERTZ (that make no 
>sense, as why does the keyboard mapping change on a USB stick?!). There 
>are comments about an external power supply (which may well be the 
>German reference), but it also "seems" to be optional.
>
>Alternatively there's the TBS6984/5 PCIe Quad Tuner device, however I'm 
>always a little wary of going down the plugged-in card route, it's much 
>easier to change out a single USB stick if it dies than fixing one tuner 
>on a multi tuner card, plus if the card goes I lose all tuners. Having 
>said that, if that's the only solution then fine.
>
>Does anyone out there have a working USB DVB-S/DVB-S2 setup (or the TBS 
>card one), and can recommend a hardware config? I appears that the same 
>"multiple channels per multiplex" rule from DVB-T applies here, so I 
>assume I will only need 4 tuners, but I suppose that depends on how many 
>channels per multiplex there are.
>
>Cheers
>Gordon

I have a TBS 5922.  It works well, but you have to compile the TBS
drivers every time there is a kernel update.  There is supposed to be
a builtin V4L driver for it now, but only so far by compiling the
newer V4L drivers, at least on Mythbuntu 14.04.  At some point the V4L
driver should appear as part of the kernel drivers, and maybe it has
with more recent kernels, but they are not available for Mythbuntu
14.04 yet.  I do not know how good the new V4L driver is as I have not
tried it.  The process of compiling the TBS drivers is not difficult -
it is just annoying to have to do it.  But if you have other tuners
that need recent drivers, there can be problems as the TBS drivers are
based on an older version of V4L.  I have no problems like that with
my other tuners as the drivers they need are in the version of V4L
that TBS provide.

The TBS 5522 is a bit bulky and really does need the external power
supply.  But as far as knew, all DVB-S/S2 USB tuners have to be bulky
like that - I have never in the past seen one advertised that was not.
So I was surprised to see what the Pinnacle 460e tuner looked like.  I
expect it will still be a bit bigger than you are expecting.  The TBS
5522 model does not have any of the CI/CAM features - those are on
other models.

I also have a PCIe DVB-S/S2 tuner (a TeVii S470), which has drivers in
the kernel.  But it is unable to tune to the lowest frequencies on my
satellite, so can not pick up the Sky NZ HD transponders on those
frequencies.  Its specifications are identical to the TBS 5522 which
can receive those frequencies, and TeVii never responded to my emails
about the problem.  Fortunately, I am not paying for the HD channels,
but if I was it would be a real problem.

Be aware that the Pinnacle 460e seems to have been replaced by the
461e which requires kernel 3.14 and above for drivers.  Mythbuntu can
be upgraded to a later kernel using the Hardware Enablement Stack:

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack

but if you have an older Mythbuntu 14.04 install it will have kernel
3.13 and you will need to upgrade it.  I have done that on my laptop
and the procedure works well, but there is a bug in the later Nvidia
drivers (or the Ubuntu install of them) that means I have to reinstall
them after every kernel upgrade on the laptop once I had upgraded
using the HES.