MS European Development Center(Dublin) working on dvb-s support

kaisersose77

Theres an interview here with a guy from microsofts development center in dublin or wherever it exactly is, and he says there working on dvb-s support. Hopefully its added whenever they release the first service pack for vista mce. Sounds good anyways as they seem to be working on european related things the MS in Redmond would never bother to look at.

http://thedigitallifestyle.com/cs/blogs/podcast/archive/2007/02/14/the-media-center-show-95-rathe-hollingum-microsoft-european-development-center.aspx

http://mediacenter.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_mediacenter_20070215_095.mp3

christophicus

Whats DVB-s?

kaisersose77

Digital satellite tv, you would be able to watch and record the free to air channels such as the bbc,itv's,film4,skynews etc. Not much but better than nothing.

christophicus

yeah taht would be cool, although are we able to pick tehm up over here in Ireland?

Krusty_Clown

That's good news.. Nice to see some Non-US-centric development. Isn't there a solution for DVB-S available already, in the form of the techotrend cards? (albeit, not officially supported)...

kaisersose77

ye there is but it makes your pc think its a dvb-t card so you cant use it with other satellite tv programs as far as i know, could be wrong. Theres another one called udr (universal digital receiver) which only scans a few satellite channels and not them all (couldnt find a solution to scan every free channel). But nice to see some non-US development as you said.

christophicus

wouldnt this require a dish then if your getting stallite?

Ghost Train

christophicus wrote:

wouldnt this require a dish then if your getting stallite?

yeah, you need to have a dish set up. I have no problems with xp, get the free astra 2 channels through it

christophicus

eolhc wrote:

yeah, you need to have a dish set up. I have no problems with xp, get the free astra 2 channels through it

DO you just need to download a program to do that and plug a dish in?

Tom Dunne

christophicus wrote:

DO you just need to download a program to do that and plug a dish in?

You would also need a DVB-S card like this, which bridges the computer to the satellite divide.

8T8

That is good news finally!

DVB-S support was actually present in XP MCE German editions due to the high level usage of DVB-S in Germany but the patch was never ported to other versions of XP MCE. At least free to air support is coming though I wonder about the future with subscription content like Sky.

Also I wonder about when the update will come as MCE updates came separate from the OS updates so hopefully it will happen before SP1.

Anyway it's nice to know the development team are focusing on issues here.

kaisersose77

This works for vista mce anyways, should be the same for xp mce

Install this
http://www.reycom-mediacenter.de/support/files/udr/UniversalDVBSetup-14112006.zip

Then search "transponder" in regedit and look for the astra 28 east folder, all the transponders are listed, some are missing, so go to kingofsat.net and get the transponder details for the ones that are missing such as film 4 etc. Im scanning in the fta channels as i type. Will have to look into getting the epg for the main channels afterwards.

kaisersose77

To get the sky epg

go here in regedit

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Media Center\Service\EPG\

and change headend to 210193
and geoid to CM2 9SY

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Media Center\Settings\ProgramGuide\

and change strlocation to CM2 9SY
and strProviderId to 210193

Have the channels scanned in before you try and get the listings and pick the get guide listings option

You will have to sort out the order of the channels and map the epg channel name to the the scanned in channel name

Havent set it all up yet but seems to be working fine for the ones i have mapped