Replacing SKY+

frozenfrozen

Looking to get rid of sky and just have saorview / freeview / freesat as well as plex with all the media stored on my pc.

General requirements are 7 day EPG with live pause & rewind as well as recording and series link. Channels from saorview and freeview or whatever else all appearing on the one EPG and no sort of switching inputs for different sets of channels. I suppose it would be too much to ask that if a program is already available locally it would be played when selected through the epg?

I've never done any of the tv tuner cards end of things and just have plex going on all the computers in the houses but not connected to TV's so there's going to be a bit of a learning curve for me.

Could someone point me in the general direction of what tuner cards I would need (looking at the blackgold BGT3655?). Does three tuners mean there can only be three channels going i.e. watching one recording two others, or could you be watching one and recording several channels as long as they were on the same mux?

I have a sonarr + couchpotato setup, with plex so really all I'm missing is the live tv end of things but I'd say that's the more difficult part to get right, and I would like it to be as easy to use as the sky+ interface.

There's an aerial up from analogue times which hasn't been used in ages but I presume I can use that for the saorview, and we already have a working sky dish and sky subscription. Would I need a second dish?

I have absolutely no interest in IPTV or getting subscription channels for free. Whatever about the moral or legal side we just couldn't deal with the low quality / high compression streams. most of the plex side of things is ripped blurays and it would be great to have untouched quality going to the tvs around the house.

I am also considering doing this in a VM by doing a passthrough with the tuner cards, so the OS doesn't really matter at all. I've got a good few free pci slots and a decent amount of free ram and cpu power so it would be easier than building a htpc just for this.

Rasberry pi's for the TVs then would be how it is actually displayed? I wouldn't necessarily be against doing hdmi over cat5 or long runs of hdmi around the house. I've been looking but haven't been able to find a working example of this kind of centralised system, so maybe it's a bad idea. I'll have to run cat5e around the house if I'm going the pi route anyway.

Sorry for the big long post, and sorry if this kind of question gets asked all the time but I gave a quick search and I couldn't find anyone asking the same exact thing.
Thanks

BrendanD

Have you considered the Wetek box ?
Twin sat receivers and Kody can be run as well , about 65e on the group buy

Johnboy1951

I use TBS tuner cards because I want to have a choice of operating system in whatever set up I might decide on in the future.
I had intended getting Blackgold but having waited for them to release drivers for Linux without any release happening I decided on the TBS. I do not regret it.

One TBS (and others no doubt) tuner card will provide all the channels of the mux/transponder to which it is tuned.

So for Saorview two tuner cards ensure that ALL Saorview TV & Radio channels can be used at the same time.
I guess if we ever get a third mux a third tuner will be needed to maintain functionality.

I use Openelec as the backend OS running Kodi, and use tvheadend to manage the tuners, epg etc.
I have not tried series recording so cannot make comment.

The backend PC with tuner cards is an old dual core P4 with only 4MB on board video - used only for set up.

The output from this backend PC is fed to a router from where other devices connect ..... via wireless and wired, and more recently via home plugs.
My experience with wireless for HD Live TV indicates that it is not optimum, so I only use it for intermittent device connections .... laptop, tablet and such.

I have dual tuner DVB-S and DVB-T cards. Both are TBS and I am very happy with their performance.

R-Pi2 for client device at TV, and NUC and a USFF PC as well as a R-Pi B is what is used here.
The R-Pi B is the weakest of them all and would advise that an R-Pi 2 should be the lowest spec acquired for this.

I run Openelec on all the client TV devices and Kodi on PCs and also on some VLC. A tablet has BSPlayer.
All can view all TV channels and stored files etc from the backend PC.


You might need a new Saorview aerial (<€15) but the existing dish will do the Satellite channels without any changes.

DVB-T tuner card for Saorview
http://www.dabs.ie/products/tbs-dual-freeview-hd-low-profile-pcie-dvb-t2-tv-tuner-card-tbs6281-99CW.html?src=3

DVB-S tuner card for Satellite
http://www.buydvb.net/dvbs2-tv-tuner-pcie-c-2/tbs6982-pcie-dvbs2-dual-tuner-tv-card-p-92.html

Those are PCI-e cards, but they should also be available in PCI format.
TBS also has cards in external cases which are USB connected to the backend PC if that is preferable.

http://www.tbsdtv.com/products/

Hopefully the above gives you some idea of one user's set up

frozenfrozen

Thanks lads I'm going to go the TBS route I think. Going to also try it with a Ras pi 2 to start off with too.

I know next to nothing about satellites, will I have to change the lnb to have more than one, or just use some kind of splitter to get the multiple inputs for those cards?

thanks for the info

Johnboy1951

frozenfrozen wrote: »

Thanks lads I'm going to go the TBS route I think. Going to also try it with a Ras pi 2 to start off with too.

I know next to nothing about satellites, will I have to change the lnb to have more than one, or just use some kind of splitter to get the multiple inputs for those cards?

thanks for the info

If you had Sky+ then I guess you have at least two outputs from the LNB which will do two Satellite tuners.

Saorview tuners will need to be fed by a Terrestrial aerial .... one feed for a dual card which in the case of TBS probably has a loop out in case you want to add another tuner.

frozenfrozen

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

If you had Sky+ then I guess you have at least two outputs from the LNB which will do two Satellite tuners.

Saorview tuners will need to be fed by a Terrestrial aerial .... one feed for a dual card which in the case of TBS probably has a loop out in case you want to add another tuner.

perfect, thanks again.

tw0nk

Can someone please explain to me benefits of using a setup like Johnboy's (server receiving satellite signal and serving to clients over http) as opposed to having a linux sat box at each tv?

Its an interesting setup, I currently have a technomate 3t nano running and it has openwebif which allows me to stream to mobile devices and watch simultaneously on the tv its connected to but wish to setup a second tv now and wondering whether i should buy a second technomate/similar or setup like johnboy, thanks.

Johnboy1951

tw0nk wrote: »

Can someone please explain to me benefits of using a setup like Johnboy's (server receiving satellite signal and serving to clients over http) as opposed to having a linux sat box at each tv?

Flexibility.

No need to run coax cable to fixed outlets in each room; instead either run ethernet cable, use Wifi or home-plugs to distribute the data as the user roams about.

The media can be displayed equally well on TVs , PCs, laptops, tablets, etc.


All cables from the dish/aerial are brought to one central location, making it much easier to manage.

In addition, lets say there is one DVB-T tuner only ...... as many users can watch TV channels from that one tuner as the hardware/LAN can manage.
All channels on the one mux tuned are available to everyone.
With two tuners, all Saorview channels are available at all times to everyone.

As a test I have had all Saorview channels displayed on my desktop at one time ....... testing my PC and the LAN..
At the same time everyone else in the house could access those same channels.

The same applies to Sat transponders ..... if a tuner is locked to one transponder then all the channels carried on that transponder are available to everyone.

Flexibility

Its an interesting setup, I currently have a technomate 3t nano running and it has openwebif which allows me to stream to mobile devices and watch simultaneously on the tv its connected to but wish to setup a second tv now and wondering whether i should buy a second technomate/similar or setup like johnboy, thanks.

tw0nk

Ah, I never knew that all channels on the transponder were available, thought it was locked to channel thats a nice feature alright!

Johnboy1951

tw0nk wrote: »

Ah, I never knew that all channels on the transponder were available, thought it was locked to channel thats a nice feature alright!

I came across a box that might be of interest ..... but have no personal experience of this myself, so cannot comment on it in use .........

https://www.satellitetv.ie/iptv-hd-receivers/xbox-xti-3340

It looks like it would be sufficient for a lot of households.

Other products from that manufacturer
http://www.vboxcomm.com/products/xti-family.html#ordering-guide

frozenfrozen

Johnboy I've learned a sh*t tonne in the last couple of days thanks to your prompts. Have you heard many/any good things about DVBSky cards? Namely the T2/S2 dual tuner 'DVBSky T9580' seems to be an ok price at around 85 euros, with two being required for all the saorview channels and also being able to at least watch / record two things on satellite (as well as whatever else is on the same sat mux).

Considering making my pc into an esxi host and having a VM for windows & also some *nix operating system VM which will host the tvheadend end of things. I've also just discovered 'miniSatIP' which I'm sure could be used to make the whole process a lot easier as I could build a small low power box running this up in the attic, and once it's set up the first time with the correct drivers for the cards, no amount of updating the backend VM/PC would cause any issues which I feel will be the biggest headache from here on out, rebuilding kernels with the correct drivers and all that end of things.

If my understanding is right I'd also be able to access the minisatip server from a cheapish set top box meaning there could be some sort of redundancy if my main pc was out of action.

Not fully sure on that last part but I'll have it all figured out fairly soon. Ordered a 3tb hard drive to back up everything before messing around with esxi anyway, then I'll go about getting the tuners once I know this end of it will work. So not really too fussed about deciding on which tuner cards to go for just yet.

Johnboy1951

frozenfrozen wrote: »

Johnboy I've learned a sh*t tonne in the last couple of days thanks to your prompts. Have you heard many/any good things about DVBSky cards? Namely the T2/S2 dual tuner 'DVBSky T9580' seems to be an ok price at around 85 euros, with two being required for all the saorview channels and also being able to at least watch / record two things on satellite (as well as whatever else is on the same sat mux).

Considering making my pc into an esxi host and having a VM for windows & also some *nix operating system VM which will host the tvheadend end of things. I've also just discovered 'miniSatIP' which I'm sure could be used to make the whole process a lot easier as I could build a small low power box running this up in the attic, and once it's set up the first time with the correct drivers for the cards, no amount of updating the backend VM/PC would cause any issues which I feel will be the biggest headache from here on out, rebuilding kernels with the correct drivers and all that end of things.

If my understanding is right I'd also be able to access the minisatip server from a cheapish set top box meaning there could be some sort of redundancy if my main pc was out of action.

Not fully sure on that last part but I'll have it all figured out fairly soon. Ordered a 3tb hard drive to back up everything before messing around with esxi anyway, then I'll go about getting the tuners once I know this end of it will work. So not really too fussed about deciding on which tuner cards to go for just yet.

The 'DVBSky T9580' has been around for quite a while and has Linux support, so should be flexible in that regard.

I have never used one so cannot comment from experience. I have not read of any real horror stories; most people seem happy with them.

Yes you will need two to cover your requirements.

I have never used tuner cards in a VM so have no idea if they will work as expected or not. Probably should.

For a really lightweight backend OS to manage tuners, recordings etc, I strongly suggest Openelec using tvheadend.
It is not promoted as a server/backend, but it does the job admirably (only thing I miss is an NFS server so have to use SMB).
An old dual core with 1GB ram would be sufficient for the backend.
Openelec is easily updated by dropping the update file into place using SMB from any PC on the LAN.

I am unsure how you envision your hardware set up ...... main PC with tuner cards and a minisap server in the attic without tuner cards?

Anyway, when you do make your decisions it would be interesting to hear back what you decided on.