WinTV Nova-t PCI

Supercell

See an add in dabs for this card, looking on the Hauppauge spec page for this, it all looks good.

Has anyone here hooked one up to a sky dish (digital)? (is this feasible?).

What was the quality like?

Mainly interested in capturing from some FTA channels (Viva in particular) , presumably the card can be manually tuned into what ever channel you want if the dish is pointed in the right direction?

Satellite without a yearly suscription sounds good given that i've got ntl cable for the forseeable future (or until they quit offering the £5/pm all weekend snl type deal).

Will it work..or does it need a standard antenna?

If it does, whats the quality like?

bkehoe

You won't get anything from it if you don't live within direct range of a UK/NI tv transmitter (no deflectors), as ITV Digital only broadcasts directly. If you're near NI, or on the East coast e.g. Wexford, and have a high gain antenna with high gain amp, then you will probably be able to get a strong enough signal; madman in North Wexford has an ITVD setup. Note that the Nova-t cannot get the pay for chans, even if you pay. BTW, ITVD is not receivable from satellite. With ITVD, it basically needs a very good signal, or there will be nothing. If you're borderline, then the picture may break up, and you may not get all muxes.

If you want a satellite receiver try the Nova, or DVB-S card, both of which can also be used for internet. You can tune to any frequency that is supported by the card, and your LNB. If pointing to 28*E, you will NOT receive the 'free' BBC chans, as they are free to view, not free to air. i.e. they're encrypted. Most of the free chans are crap, and a good few are shopping chans, and a few news ones. Other free ones are usually in other languages.

Brendan

Supercell

Thanks for the info bkehoe, looking to find out which card would would be recommended for a pc setup.

Ideally i want to hook up the dish cable directly to the pc (if that is possible) , and capture directly.

TBH i just want to capture from FTA channels mainly and would like to avoid going through the digibox if i can avoid it.

So with a sky setup, ie digibox and dish, can i just plug my sat cable directly into the pc with any card?, if so..whats best?

byte

I was under the impression that Happauge had a similar card which used Digital Satellite transmissions.

Blade

Don't waste yer time with crappy cards, go for the Happauge wintv dvb-s, it'll get you all the FTA channels on digital on whatever sat your facing, plus you can use it for satellite internet. You can also get add-on modules for Pay per view channels (not SKY) later on if you want, a bit more expensive but well worth it, ask anyone about the choice of channels on SECA for example and you won't bother with SKY. You can download codes for decoding most of the channels. You don't even need a smart card if you use a season interface, you can manually input the channel updates on your PC, you just need to find them on the net. It's a bit of a pain in the nuts doing it that way but at least you can do it yourself, you'd be better off however getting someone to program a smart card for you.

Have a look at this site I made up ages ago, it's not really out of date though cause nothing much has changed since:

http://www.esatclear.ie/~lorenzo/dvb

The winTV card by TT is exactly the same one as the Happauge just under a different brand, whatever card you go for just make sure it'll either take a CI-CAM or can be upgraded to take one.

P.S. I don't sell anything, supply codes, or program cards for other people.

chernobyl

go for a cheap capture card and get a proper decoder and loop it into the capture card.
watching TV and film on the pc is not natural and not enjoyable.
get a proper deocder with CAM access.

Blade

Another thing which is probably no use to you but it is possible to do what you want without a PC card using a Nokia D-Box flashed with DVB2000 software and connected to your PC via a SCSI cable, this setup allows you to do some funky things like grab stills and video to your HD and scan and grab other peoples satellite internet data transmissions (FOC) without even subscribing to a Sat-Net ISP. In other words grab other peoples downloads at purdy high speeds.

Blade

Sure you can output it to TV anyway, thats the whole idea, unless of course your TV's in a different room which starts getting messy then anyway.

Givvus your MAC Address there chernobyl

chernobyl

i think EON is the only "ISP" up there and you can eves drop to the tune of 2mb sec but you have no control over tranmissions, you just start recieving data and you could start recieving a file 10minutes after it started tranmission and if you get the full whack (ie) anything up to 16mb/sec then your machine will slow to a crawl.
you have no control when you listen in to multicast tansmissions and picking up on unicast is harder and alot slower.

Blade

Arr I know it's only for fun, it's not practical, EON's cheap anyway, I see their giving away a free card ATM, 150 Euros for a years sub and the card and the same for the just the years sub! I don't know anything about that card, no details on it there, is it the same one you got chernobyl? If so can you give me any info on it?

chernobyl

I have two of them Blade.
They are the best money/for bang card ever.
They MPEG2 decoder is not fully hardware accelerated but more hardware assited.
it runs on everything from 98 to xp to debian

++ TechniSat SkyStar 2 PC card ++

PC card allowing you to receive all free-to-air digital satellite TV and
radio programmes, plus access data streaming and the Internet via Satellite
services on-offer (including the ability to download software, partake in
multi-casting and use audio visual features).

- Full MPEG-2 compliant digital TV and radio functions
- Symbol Rate Mb/s 2000-45000
- SCPC and MCPC compatible
- Automatic Channel Search
- DiSEqC 1.0
- Full teletext functions
- Compatible for receiving information data
- Data Streaming max 90 Mbps

Blade

chernobyl seein your online there, fancy popping onto #boards.ie on IRC for a chat? Same one the chat thing on these boards links you to. I'll be on for the next 30 mins or so.

Supercell

Much appreciated Blade and chernobyl, a lot of stuff there for me to digest, thanks!!

Supercell

The WinTV DVB-S seems to be pretty much the type of card ideally suited to my needs.

I do remember seeing a DVB board a long time ago but cannot find it on google( other than in german) , anyone here know the URL?

Blade had a look at you're site, pretty informative, where did you get the kit from?

Also you say your also going to need a Universal LNB rather than a standard one as it has a much wider frequency range to pick up digital channels and Internet Data. , does a sky digi, jobbie meet this requirement?

Also I was advised by people in the business that even on the Hotbird Satellite a lot of providers are switching over to SECA. Hotbird is only a few degrees away from Astra and by adding a second LNB to your dish you'll pick up both Satellites using the one dish , again can the sky dish be "modded" to use a second LNB?, if so are there any Dublin based operations that offer this service?

Sorry for my dammed newbie questions, i am learning, promise!!

chernobyl

The LNb on the sky mini dish is Universal but theres not a hope of the mini dish grabbing Astra 28.2*East and Hotbird 13*East.


With the standard 90CM dish it is possible to get Astra 19.2 and Hotbird and you can buy a standard LNb fitting that hold 2 LNb's with no modification needed for the dish.

Like this.



But to recieve Astra 28.2 and Hotbird you will need @ least a 1M dish with modified LNb arms and an LNb meter so the job can be done in a resonable amount of time.

a challenge....

If your going for that setup then i advise you to use a seperate dish for Sky Digi and use the standard 80/90CM dish for Astra 19.2 and Hotbird and just use a 3-1 diseq switch to join all coax inot a single cable that will run into your card.

byte

I dunno how much these cards should be costing but Marx-Computers is selling the Hauppauge card for IR£275. I would imagine it would be costly for Irish to buy from dabs.com due to weakness of punt versus the sterling.

Blade

Ewwww thats way too expensive, their usually under 200 stg in the UK, scan for example have them, but the cheapest place I've seen is http://www.dvb-shop.de/ these guys also do all the add-ons.

byte

Well that has the advantage of using same currency as us (soon). Though some lessons in German might not go amiss!