Freesat via pc

marcusarillius

Hey guys,

What is the easiest way to get freesat on my pc?
I have a sat cable running into the house and was going to order a dvb-s2 tuner.
Is this all I need and just use media center as the interface, or is there a better option?

I want full freesat capabilities with the full EPG and all programs properly listed automatically.

Any advice welcomed.

Thanks,

Mark.

Wabbit Ears

Windows media center and a DVB-S2 card will get you the UK free to air channels and a live EPG.

Freesat is an actual service so NO, You wont get freesat, but what you do get is pretty close.

Note however its not an out of the box solotion. I find a lot of teh preset channels dont work so heres my advice:

After initial setup run the full satellite scan in WMC 2 more times until it says no new channels found.

Then, Using Guidetool (http://1geek1tool.com/guidetool) , Uncheck all channels (select all and hit space twice, giving it a bit of time between hitting space to actually do its work)

Once all the channels are unchecked find the channels you want (use the sticky on the top of the satellite forum here) and tick them one by one and check as you go that they work. ignore the numbering for now.

once you've gotten your channels playing, assign numbers to them in order of preference in guide tool ( you can choose to hide all unchecked channels for this)

now you have them in order start assigning epg sources in guide tool, most channels have several sources listed and some work better then others, its another try and see.

You can save these listings if you donate to guidetool.


this will take a few hours to do fully. another option is to buy a freesat box from the uk/north.

Zimmerframe

Or buy an elgato tuner, and just plug it in. It's as close as you are going to get to "an out of the box" solution.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Elgato-EyeTV-Sat-Free-Mac/dp/B004FPUB1Y/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1355055087&sr=8-7
Bear in mind it's a single tuner too.
The "eyetv" software is excellent, and there are iphone apps etc.

Johnboy1951

I think I would prefer a TDS 6981 Twin Tuner Sat card for about the same price and fit it inside the PC.

The extra set up as described should be worth the hassle .... giving lots of possibilities for recording or multicasting from the second tuner.

But I suppose if there is only one Sat cable ......

marcusarillius

Cheers for the feedback guys.

So there is no way to get the freesat EPG etc. with a dvb-s2 card in the PC?
This USB card you mentioned, Is there much setup required or does it do the full freesat setup out of the box?

Suppose the reason I wanted freesat was the better EPG and not just now and next like I am getting on the tv with FTA at present.

The tv is actually supposed to have a freesat tuner built in but it doesn't show up for me. Only FTA. Sony KDL-40Z5800.

I have 2 sat cables running in to the room, but don't really know if I would use the dual functionality? Maybe I would. Haven't really watched actual tv in years, just got this setup yesterday on the tv as it had a sat tuner built in so I though why not.
I normally download everything I watch.

Would be nice to have the freesat setup, or as close to it as I can got through the pc though. Prob use it for top gear and formula 1.
Getting a projector this week and hooking it up to the pc, so would be nice to watch the f1 on the big screen.

Wabbit Ears

I'm not sure how you misread my post, WMC gives you a full freesat like 7 day guide...

The USB tuner mentioned is nothing more then a USB tuner and really doesnt address anything in your original Question....

When I tried to use WMC I found it a pain. The channel list was years out of date and I had to use third party hacks to tune the system and keep the EPG updated.

marcusarillius

Wabbit Ears wrote: »

I'm not sure how you misread my post, WMC gives you a full freesat like 7 day guide...

The USB tuner mentioned is nothing more then a USB tuner and really doesnt address anything in your original Question....

Ah ok, sorry mate.

Is there any solution that will import the channels already numbered correctly and with no duplicates, or does this have to be done manually like you described?
If not, is it possible to download presaved setups that someone has done and import them?

I know I might sound pretty lazy but just wondering out of interest

Also can you recommend a good make of tuner card to get? Prob will go for single tuner due to the fact that anything I want to record I will prob just download.
Only want the tv capabilities for a few progs that I will watch live like I said above.
If I want o record what I'm watching and not another channel, a single tuner will do fine I guess

Wabbit Ears

I have a hauppauge dvb-s2 card and its worked great for years now, cant fault it.

i got it cheap off ebay, often they go for less then 50 quid, like this one that i watched just end:

http://www.ebay.ie/itm/Hauppauge-WinTV-NOVA-HD-S2-DVB-S2-Digital-Satellite-PCI-Card-Freesat-HD-/281031697735?pt=UK_Computing_Video_Capture_TV_Tuner_Cards&hash=item416ecb6547&autorefresh=true

Unfortunatly no, the lineups in guidetool and wmc are hardware specific and are not transferable, Ive tried many times..

The best forum to ask specifics on is the thegreenbutton.tv

marcusarillius

What's the TBS TBS6981 like?
If it's decent I might spend the extra seeing as I have 2 cables and might end up finding the dual tuner handy.

Johnboy1951

Blackgold appear to be the best out there from what I can gather.
I had hoped to get a BGT3600 but they failed to release the Linux drivers so I had to look around.

The next best/most popular, from reading, was the TBS range.

Here are some links for you

http://shop.blackgold.tv/epages/BT3159.sf/en_AU/?ObjectPath=/Shops/BT3159/Categories/%22Retail%20Products%22/PCIe_Tuner_Products

http://www.tbsdtv.com/products/tbs6981-dvb-s2-dual-tuner-pcie-card.html

http://www.digitaldevices.de/english/DD-DVB-Komponenten.html

I ordered a TBS 6981 but have not yet received it.

marcusarillius

Cheers mate.

EDIT:-

Just ordered the TBS TBS6981. Should have it in a few days. Will report back when it's up and running.

Thanks for all the help guys

marcusarillius

Right got the card and it's working fine.

Having a few issues though.

Firstly ITV HD doesn't have it's own channel listing, you have to use ITV 1 and because of that the prog "my channel logos" doesn't put a logo on the HD version, more to the point, in the logo editing section it doesn't even show up as a separate channel. Only when you disassociate the listing from ITV 1 from the ITV HD can you put it's own logo on it.
Then it doesn't have any listings.

There are a few other channels that don't show any listings either, even some that don't show up in the guide services of guide tool, so you can't assign listings to them, and some that won't tune in at all.
Mainly Channel 4 HD, can't get it at all. Had it when cable was into tv but not with tuner in pc.

I really expected all this to work a bit better than it does. Can't imagine there is no software out there that can auto detect all this stuff.

A little underwhelmed so far with it all, unless of course I'm doing something wrong?

Also is there any way to get media center to change refresh rate automatically to suit the content it's playing, cause now it's just locked at 60fps all the time, dunno if this will effect playback at all?

A final note, The HD channels that I can get don't look as sharp as they did straight into the tv.

Alun

I don't have any problems with ITV1/ITV1 HD in combination with mychannellogos .. I have logos and listings for both. Not sure what you're doing wrong.

The problem with the missing channels is that the transponder and channel list MCE uses out of the box is way out of date. Transponders and channels have moved around, new ones have been created, old ones deleted etc. and they haven't kept up. You could do a full transponder scan, and that will pick up a few of the missing ones, but you'll have to do individual transponder scans on the transponders that the channels you want are on to get them all. See kingofsat or lyngsat for details.

I agree, it's all very tedious, and there's a steep learning curve getting to know how to tweak it to any degree of usefulness, and if my current Media Center setup were to die a death, I'd probably look into using something else like MediaPortal.

marcusarillius

Cheers man. Got most channels working now. Set location as UK instead of Ireland, so dunno if that helped.
Got the ITV HD detecting as separate channel now too.

Prob I am having though is the HD broadcasts don't look as sharp as they did directly into the tv. Is there some weird compression that WMC uses or something? Or maybe the tv was sharpening it up a bit?

Alun

Yes, the UK EPG feeds are much more complete than the Irish ones, which is daft seeing as it's the same satellites, but there you go. Also there's a problem at the moment with the Irish EPG feeds being covered in another thread.

Do you have your video card set to the same native resolution as your TV? If not there'll be some up- or down-scaling going on which won't help.

What video card do you have? If it's an ATI card, go into the Catalyst Control Centre and turn all the so-called video "enhancements" (auto contrast, edge enhancement, de-noise etc.) off, they only serve to mess up the picture IMO. If your card can handle it also set Interleave manually to it's maximum level (mines vector adaptive). If it's an nVidia card I'm sure there are equivalent settings.

Also bear in mind that many TV sets store different settings for sharpness/ colour/contrast/brightness etc. for each input so the settings you may have had on one input may not be the same as for the other.

marcusarillius

marcusarillius wrote: »

Cheers man. Got most channels working now. Set location as UK instead of Ireland, so dunno if that helped.
Got the ITV HD detecting as separate channel now too.

Prob I am having though is the HD broadcasts don't look as sharp as they did directly into the tv. Is there some weird compression that WMC uses or something? Or maybe the tv was sharpening it up a bit?

Most TVs apply sharpening to the picture by default but won't do so when a PC is connected. This can usually be configured. You might also want to be sure that the PC is outputting at 50 Hz, because at 60 Hz you'll probably notice motion judder.

Alun

Karsini wrote: »

Most TVs apply sharpening to the picture by default but won't do so when a PC is connected.

Maybe for a VGA connection, but for an HDMI connection it can make no assumptions as to what's connected to it, could be anything.

Alun

Alun wrote: »

Maybe for a VGA connection, but for an HDMI connection it can make no assumptions as to what's connected to it, could be anything.

Nope, I know that with my TV, if I connect a PC to HDMI port 1, it turns off overscan and doesn't apply any optimisations. If I set the PC refresh rate to 50Hz, it doesn't treat it as a PC anymore.

Alun

Karsini wrote: »

Nope, I know that with my TV, if I connect a PC to HDMI port 1, it turns off overscan and doesn't apply any optimisations. If I set the PC refresh rate to 50Hz, it doesn't treat it as a PC anymore.

So it doesn't know it's a PC per se, it's just basing the decision on the refresh rate then. Mine doesn't care one way or another.