TV Tuner Advice - DVB-T2 and DVB-S2

[elsmandino]

Hello,

I am after some tuner cards and would be really grateful to know what is recommended.

I need two DVB-T2 tuners and four DVB-S2 tuners.

I don't necessarily need them to work out of the box - just as long as they can run properly without doing anything ludicrously complicated.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[PhilB]

My tuner cards are now obsolete PCI interface so I am interested in any replies you get, but I am intrigued why you want six tuners.
You are aware of the multirec facility which enables multiple channel recordings from a single multiplex via a single tuner? I have 3 dvbt tuners which are admittedly standard definition but have never limited me. The third one is rarely used apart from gathering eit scheduling information.
Phil

[MikeB2013]

I use TBS pci-e tuners for both DVB-T/T2 (TBS 6280 dual input) and DVB-S/S2 (TBS 6981 dual input). My tuners have been in service for several years and work well with both UK Freeview and Freesat for SD and HD.

TBS provide their own drivers, so mixing and matching tuners from other manufacturers can be problematic as TBS use an older media stack You need to reinstall TBS drivers every time the linux kernel is updated, simple enough but you have to remember to do this. There are also open source drivers (ljalves, crazycat) which use a more up to date media stack, again these have to be reinstalled when linux kernel is updated

Multirec is great for DVB-T/T2 (UK Freeview), where main HD channels are on a single multiplex, but is less useful for DVB-S/S2 (UK Freesat) due to the channel allocations across satellite multiplexes (transponders). For mythtv 0.28 (current release) multirec can be set record 5 simultaneous channels in a single multiplex, in mythtv 0.29 pre (master) multirec has been increased to 10.

Mike

[elsmandino]

Thank you both for your responses.

On reflection, I think perhaps six tuners is a bit unnecessary in the circumstances. As I watch channels that are unique to both Freesat and Freeview. I am going to need both so perhaps two tuners for each should easily suffice - the question then is whether it is better to go with a single device that offers all four tuners are buy two dual tuners.

Thank you also for the TBS recommendations - they look great .

I definitely agree that Freeview's multiplexing is certainly much better than Freesat's for using single tuners for multiple streams.

Given that I am only after four tuners now, this leaves the option of a network tuner like this:

https://digitaldevices.de/products/netw ... s_net_mix/

Is this something that MythTV supports and, if so, are network tuners worth considering?

[MikeB2013]

Don't know about the digitaldevices network tuner, but it is SAT-IP, which is relatively new and not currently supported, as far as I know, by mythtv (I have seen some posts where people are working on it).

Mythtv does support network tuners from Vbox (see http://www.vboxcomm.com/). However at present the multirec capability of these network tuners is not officially in mythtv. I have produced a patch to mythtv with does support multirec on the VBOX XTI 3442 (dual DVB-T/T2 - i.e. Freeview). It should work with DVB-S/S2 Vboxes but has not been tested as I only have the XTI 3442.

PCI-e tuners like TBS (or DVBSKY) have been around a long time and are well tried and tested in mythtv, which means there is plenty of support available in case of problems. I would go for two dual PCI-e cards from the same manufacturer. These are all single slot, so as long as you have 2xPCI-e slots free in your pc you should be good to go.

Mike

[luc5588]

I'd go for usb tuners rather than internal purely because it gives you far greater flexibility to move them to another machine in the future, especially since the low-spec machines such as Pi have got more powerful recently so in a few years you might want to move to a Pi6.

USB2 has 480Mb/s which is more than enough capacity to handle multiple recordings of the entire multiplex for several tuners. Say it's 10mb/s then you could record 30 concurrent recordings (allowing for significant protocol overhead) per usb hub. Many channels here use far lower bandwidth, some even lower than 1Mb/s.

I purchsed my usb dvb-s2 tuners many years ago and they can no longer be purchased and the company doesn't seem to make a newer version. The linuxtv.org wiki has other tuners and effort/drivers required but the site no longer seems to be updated.

I don't know how EPG works with sat/ip, I'm guessing each client has to do their own EPG. Last time I checked mythtv explicitly disables grabbing EPG from non-dvb/non-vbox sources.

If network tuning is something you want for streaming to tablets then there are free programs such as minisatip and tvheadend that can take your dvb inputs and then convert them to be a sat/ip network tuner.