PC Sat DVB-S and Media Centre

slegs

Some advice needed.

Buying a new desktop PC with Vista Home Premium. Want to get a sat card. Any advice on a good option. Want the ability to integrate fully with Media Centre as I have an XBOX 360. Also would like to have motor control (diseq?) also. Potentially HD future proofed also..

Suggestions would be appreciated.

watty

Home Premiun is seriously cut down version of XP pro
Either get full version of Vista that lets you run XP pro without buying it or Get PC with XP pro.

Vista is parctically banned from UK schools it is so bad and offers nothing over XP pro.

An MS Media Center is two things:
Specific MS approved HW and MC edition of XP or Vista, not the regular PC (though that can be upgraded) and not the regular OS.

Sat cards are unreliable for Motor control. Some do & some don't. It takes extra current. Iv'e tried 4 different cards and twice had to do a Reset on the Motor via hole out at dish. All my set-box receivers, except Sky model work Motor fine. The Reel-Box lite has 320G HDD, ethernet, two tuners, HD option, DVD writer etc. The Avantguarde even more. Poor software though, but it works.

A Technotrend DVBs-2 card and very high end graphics like Nvidia GT8800 series. You need the MPEG4 horsepower for HD. With Vista there might be HDMI / HD issues. Get a version of Graphics card with HDMI and Composite/S-Video connectors as well as Monitor connector.

If you had some sort of external automatic 14V /18V inline PSU to boost the current of the PC Sat card but while I know how to make one I haven't seen one forsale.

Motor operation is marginal. So with a slower motor and smaller / lighter dish and the top of the variations of the Sat card, Motor control will work.

IMO you want a lightweight 1.1m Triax in a sheltered position. Bigger would be better, but then you need a 36V motor system. Diseqc GotoX adaptors to 36V system do exist and that is likely a way round the current limitation.

Most Sw that comes with a Sat card does not do Motor control. You need to use ProgDVD or similar 3rd party. However I've not been able to get ProgDVD to work with my S2 card only the other cards.
I have had up to 4 cards in a PC. Two is recomended so you can record different to what you watch. But then you need 2x 4 way DISEQC switchs and 4 Dual LNBS (or 4 Quattro LNBs and a EMP-Centauri 16 output multiswitch) or two separte motorised dishes!

slegs

Thanks Watty for all the detail

slegs

I thought Vista Home premium had Media Centre built in?

homer911

Watty - you seem to know lots about satellite, but you sod all about Vista!

Zaphod

watty wrote: »

If you had some sort of external automatic 14V /18V inline PSU to boost the current of the PC Sat card but while I know how to make one I haven't seen one forsale.

http://www.spaun.de/?lang=en&modul=products&product=832109&productname=SN1418

watty

Nice Zaphod.

@homer911
I know more about XP, Vista etc than Satellite, but this isn't the forum and my posts on Windows here are deliberately simplified and deliberately denegrating to the worst release apart from ME. Admittedly I know most about NT4.0 having rolled out clusters and about 1000 workstations on it. There is no reason whatsoever to change from XP pro to Vista, just like NT4.0 or Win98SE is seriously better than ME. I doubt any number of SP or even the next version can fix the underlying disease that started as MS lost is way design wise between NT3.51 and NT 4.0. The cut down nature of Win2k (NT5.0) and how bloated it became as finalised as XP (NT5.1) was the symtom getting visible.

The product franchise has reached the end of the road in Gold plated Syndrome. OS X (not really bettter) and various Linux will gradually eat. Vista takeup in terms of current size of PC market is a disaster for MS compared with XP takeup for size of market then.

Windows CE/Phone/Mobile at Ver 6 has now peaked (Developed from OS created for Sega Dreamcast and little relationship to desktop/server windows) and MS is losing ground. It's a seriously flawed concept of UI on 320x240 screen and on larger screens Linux or XP makes more sense (depending on CPU available). MS has admitted Mobile needs fixed and have a roadmap to achieve this completely by Mobile8, which I predict will need x4 more resource than current Linux on ARM mobiles and possibly more than a cut down XP.

watty

slegs wrote: »

I thought Vista Home premium had Media Centre built in?

It depends what you mean by "Media Centre"
Anything less than the non-home versions of Vista has actually less features than XP pro.

MS "Media Centre" is a complete HW & SW concept. You can't have it simply loading the OS on a standard PC. Indeed "Vista Home premium" has some SW seen in XP MCE but 3rd party SW is better without specific MCE PC the SW is worthless.

The reason for foisting some of these "teletubby" MS concepts of Media into the OS to make it more bloated and slower with more DRM, was in fact up till now, sales wise actual Media Centre HW/SW sales totally tanked. Many Manufacturers scrapped models due to lack of demand.

The fact is that people mostly want a laptop or a simple to use PVR that needs no keyboard and Mouse. A MS concept media system at the living room TV is a minority sport that is increasing doomed except for maybe students in a bedsit. A decent PVR/Media streamer can now be 1/10th the price of a Media PC.


In any other industry you could not release a "fix" like this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/14/windows_sp1_rc_refresh_open/