[huzz456]

Hi

Im trying to get my head around what is the best way to get rid of my sky+ box and receive freesat around my house to my xbmc devices. I currently have an imac upstairs which stays on all the time doing downloading with sickbeard etc and i am building a HTPC for my lounge to replace an apple tv which will be put elsewhere in the house. It makes sense to me to use the imac as a backend for live tv to serve to my devices through xbmc as its on all the time anyway. My problem is that my sky dish cables obviously currently go to the tv downstairs where the htpc will be.

So is it possible for me to connect something along the lines of HDhomerun or eyetv (i dont think either of these are actually capable of doing exactly what i want) to the sat dish cables downstairs then MythTV can receive from upstairs and can serve my xbmc devices around the home. Preferably i want to have a dual conection with HD.

I've searched around for some time and feel like there is something i can do but am not sure the best way to do it. Any and all suggestions welcome, if there is a much better way of doing this i'd love to know!

[huzz456]

Forgot to mention I'm in the uk!

[deadite66]

wouldn't it just be easier to add a DVB-S2 card to the htpc your making downstairs and put the myth backend on it?, recording takes very little cpu.

[nickr]

I am not aware of any hdhomerun like devices for satellite (DVB-S). If you can't run the satellite cables to the place where you want the backend, you'll have to take the backend to the cables. I know this is probably a bit of a bummer as your backend can often be a noisy powerful box put away in a cupboard.

Isn't there also a freeview service with similar offerings to freesat operating over DVB-T in the UK? You might be able to use your an HDHomerun with that (although if you need DVB-T2 I am not sure if that works on HDHR). I have two dual DVB-T HD Homeruns here in NZ and they are awesome.

If you join the mythtv-users mailing list there are plenty of UK users there who can give more specific advice.

[huzz456]

wouldn't it just be easier to add a DVB-S2 card to the htpc your making downstairs and put the myth backend on it?, recording takes very little cpu.

Yeah I can do that it's just I wasn't planning on having any storage other than an ssd on that one and didn't want to have to have that one on all the time aswell as my iMac. If I did put it on the HTPC downstairs and wanted it to sleep does mythtv wake it up if something is scheduled to record?

[nickr]

Yes it can be configured to wake up for recordings.

[deadite66]

wonder how feasible it is to save and play recordings from a network share, if using Ethernet i think it's doable.

maybe save to the upstairs machine.

[oldtvwatcher]

I am not aware of any hdhomerun like devices for satellite (DVB-S).

While there are no DVB-S devices that will sit out on a network the way a HDHomeRun does, there are two reasonably-priced USB devices that I am aware of:
Prof Revolution DVB-S2 7500 USB
TBS5925 Professional DVB-S2 TV Tuner USB

The first seems to be the one that is preferred by those in the know, in part because its software is open source, but it does not explicitly claim any Linux support. The second supposedly does have Linux and MythTV support, but if you read some of the forums you find that may be more hype than actuality, since you have to compile source code to get it to work. It's not like you can download the software from the Ubuntu Software Center or even get it using Synaptic or apt-get.

There are people using both of these devices but I have yet to come across any articles showing how to make them work with MythTV, and believe me I've been looking for them. People claim it should be theoretically possible to make them work but when you ask if anyone has actually done it, that's when the crickets come out and start chirping.

Here are a couple of threads I have been watching on the subject:
http://www.satelliteguys.us/threads/3017...y-thoughts
http://www.satelliteguys.us/threads/1916...000-Tuners

WARNING: If you have bandwidth caps don't hang around the SatelliteGuys site, they do some kind of weird auto-refresh thing where the pages are constantly refreshing every 15 or 20 seconds or so. So after you are finished reading be sure to close the browser tab or the browser itself, or go to another site. I have never seen such a bandwidth-hogging site in my life (except for the deliberate trojan horse sites) as that one!

Here's an entire forum on these devices, on a much more bandwidth-friendly site. Note they also cover PCI cards and such but I don't care much for those because many smaller, low-power computers either won't accept cards at all, or won't accept full-size PCI cards. Whereas a USB device will probably work for the foreseeable future.

http://rickcaylor.websitetoolbox.com/?forum=106995

If anyone knows of other sites or forums that cover this topic I would love to know about them.

My overall impression is that if you are not a true Linux enthusiast you are probably going to have some difficultly getting any of these devices to work with MythTV and/or XBMC, but I would love to be proven wrong on that. One issue is that in North America there is not that much left to see on Free-To-Air DVB-S and (unless you like PBS) all the really good stuff is on C-band, which means you have to have at least a 6 foot dish (and that's at a minimum) to have any hope of getting decent reception. And few people know how to aim or tune those anymore, even though they were quite popular (especially in rural areas) 20 or 30 years ago.

[nickr]

Oh there are dvb-s2 devices that work on linux and mythtv for sure. And in the UK (which we were discussing here) there are plenty of channels.

[deadite66]

http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-S2_Devices

[oldtvwatcher]

I am not aware of any hdhomerun like devices for satellite (DVB-S).

Apparently one is coming in March, though I don't know how well it will work with XBMC. There is a discussion in this thread:

http://rickcaylor.websitetoolbox.com/pos...ox-6179556

I have no idea if this thing will be a dream or a dud, but from what I can tell it should operate pretty similar to a HDHomeRun except for DVB-S satellite. If anyone buys one, please post and say how it worked for you.