[linux-dvb] Well working S2 cards?

[linux-dvb] Well working S2 cards?

[Mika Laitio]

Hi

I am planning to obtain satellite dish and some PCI or PCIE satellite 
card for my Linux box that is running X86-64 on amd 4850e.

So far I have found the Technotrend S2-3200 and WinTV NOVA-HD-S2 that 
seems to be pretty equally priced. Then the HVR-4000 costs about 50 euro 
more but has in addition the DVB-T support.

What card you would recommend for the Linux usage and for which one the 
drivers are working best? (running on AMD x86-64 with 4850e cpu)
And is there any differences in the tuner quality of these cards?

I assume I would with all of these cards use these multiproto/multiprotu 
plus versions from drivers and apps...

Mika

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Re: [linux-dvb] Well working S2 cards?

[ChaosMedia > WebDev]

> Mika Laitio wrote:
>
> I am planning to obtain satellite dish and some PCI or PCIE satellite 
> card for my Linux box that is running X86-64 on amd 4850e.
>
> So far I have found the Technotrend S2-3200 and WinTV NOVA-HD-S2 that 
> seems to be pretty equally priced. Then the HVR-4000 costs about 50 euro 
> more but has in addition the DVB-T support.
>   
don't know about the hvr-4000
i have a tt s2-3200 it's cheap and works well, i don't use the CI 
though, so i can't tell if it's well supported by the driver 
(multiproto) but besides the CI part i couldn't tell you what's not 
properly working with this card at the moment..

you'll get some good info on linuxtv wiki : 
http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-S2_PCI_Cards


But if you're going for Sat HD (1080i h264) on linux 64bit, i don't 
think the dvb device will be the problem as long as it has a working driver.

> What card you would recommend for the Linux usage and for which one the 
> drivers are working best? (running on AMD x86-64 with 4850e cpu)
> And is there any differences in the tuner quality of these cards?
>   
With 1080i H264 that you'll get on DVB-T or DVB-S2 (in europe) the main 
problem will be to properly decode it.

If you're on 32bit you'll probably go for a dvb app with a CoreAVC patch 
and use that windows 32bit decoder, then your CPU hardware or the stream 
source, won't really matter as it's a very fast, full featured, decoder..

On 64bit, you won't be able to use CoreAVC as simply as on 32bit, it's a 
work in progress as far as i can tell. Then the only straight way to 
decode h264 is through ffmpeg (ffh264) and that decoder will probably 
have some troubles decoding some (most) sat streams.
Problems will come either from the stream specifications, unsuported in 
ffh264, that will produce a jerky decoding or from the lack of CPU of 
your system..
Although it seems that latest ffh264 version do use multithreading on 
those 1080i streams, tested myself on ANIXEHD/ ASTRA PROMO HD streams, 
ffh264 is not a multithreaded decoder to begin with so in the worst case 
senario it'll use one single core of your CPU for decoding and then you 
can get in serious troubles..

I personnaly have now a much better experience with my little intel 
e2180 than i got with my previous AMD be2350, both are overclocked 
around 2.8-3.0GHz.


So choosing your dvb-s2 hardware/system is important regarding the DVB 
part but also and probably more important regarding h264 decoding, 
especially when using 64bit systems..

sorry it was a bit long ;)

Marc

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Re: [linux-dvb] Well working S2 cards?

[Mika Laitio]

> don't know about the hvr-4000
> i have a tt s2-3200 it's cheap and works well, i don't use the CI 
> though, so i can't tell if it's well supported by the driver 
> (multiproto) but besides the CI part i couldn't tell you what's not 
> properly working with this card at the moment..
>
> you'll get some good info on linuxtv wiki : 
> http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-S2_PCI_Cards
>
>
> But if you're going for Sat HD (1080i h264) on linux 64bit, i don't 
> think the dvb device will be the problem as long as it has a working 
> driver.
Yes, I also think the card with best driver support base is THE THING 
here. It seems that for many cards the official DVB drivers and apps are 
now in a little flux state
with multiple each other incompatible kernel driver and userspace app 
interfaces. I hope some resolution is achieved and branches are starting 
to find back to DVB tree.

But nice to hear that all 3 of these cards have changes to work both 
with S and S2.

>> What card you would recommend for the Linux usage and for which one 
>> the drivers are working best? (running on AMD x86-64 with 4850e cpu)
>> And is there any differences in the tuner quality of these cards?
>>   
> With 1080i H264 that you'll get on DVB-T or DVB-S2 (in europe) the 
> main problem will be to properly decode it.
It would be interesting to find some dvb-t usb gadget for playing with 
it and laptop while sitting on the city cafe.
>
> Problems will come either from the stream specifications, unsuported 
> in ffh264, that will produce a jerky decoding or from the lack of CPU 
> of your system..
> Although it seems that latest ffh264 version do use multithreading on 
> those 1080i streams, tested myself on ANIXEHD/ ASTRA PROMO HD streams, 
> ffh264 is not a multithreaded decoder to begin with so in the worst 
> case senario it'll use one single core of your CPU for decoding and 
> then you can get in serious troubles..
Yeah, the 780G chipset I have has something called UVD 2.0 integrated to 
motherboard that should provide hardware acceleration for decoding VC-1, 
H.264 (AVC), WMV, and MPEG-2 sources up to 1080p resolutions. But I pet 
no-one has data available for getting the Linux encoding/decoding 
libraries to support those features.


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Re: [linux-dvb] Well working S2 cards?

[ChaosMedia > WebDev]

> Mika Laitio wrote:
> But nice to hear that all 3 of these cards have changes to work both 
> with S and S2.
As i said i haven't had any problems with my tt s2-3200 and multiproto 
driver.
I believe that "budget" cards like that one are easier to support 
because their design is basic.


> It would be interesting to find some dvb-t usb gadget for playing with 
> it and laptop while sitting on the city cafe.
some usb dvb-t adapters are supported but never tested that so i can't 
tell for sure.
i need to get a dvb-t device myself but it'll be a pci one..

> Yeah, the 780G chipset I have has something called UVD 2.0 integrated 
> to motherboard that should provide hardware acceleration for decoding 
> VC-1, H.264 (AVC), WMV, and MPEG-2 sources up to 1080p resolutions. 
> But I pet no-one has data available for getting the Linux 
> encoding/decoding libraries to support those features.
>
There's no GPU hardware acceleration currently on linux, as far as i 
known, besides xvmc for MPEG2 on nvidia chipsets if i'm correct..
So you'll have to rely only on your CPU for decoding h264 and that can 
be quite tricky with 1080i..

As Igor pointed out there's an existing project to bring coreavc support 
to 64 bit linux, but i couldn't get it to work so far and have no idea 
how stable it actually is..
Having something that "works" is very different from having something 
that works but will crash or freeze your app every few channel zap..
But again i'm not telling it's not working as i couldn't get it to work 
on my setup yet..

Good luck.

Marc


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