Skystar HD card seemingly available in the UK now :)

[fergycool]

Oh well.

What do you reckon is the the most recent, or rather the best, DVB-S card I can get for Linux at the moment?

I'm really after something that will decode M4, France 24, and a whole host of channels that have recentyl appeared on hotbird 13 (or astra 19. Not too sure which).

All these are currently blank.

Cheers
ferg

[BGonaSTICK]

Your SS2 should handle all the recent FTA channel launches :?

Working fine here. Which ones in particular can't you view? Try rescanning the transponder they're on in case there have been PID changes.

[fergycool]

Hi,

you are right. I looked up the channels (well one of them, my box is currently shutdown, and I cannot remember all of them) on KingofSat, and according to that it is encrypted. MythTV is set to ignore all encrypted channels, so I'm not sure why it's picking this one up!

Cheers
Ferg

[BGonaSTICK]

OK, good. Have you managed to get any plugins running to perform some decrypting?

I think the whole thing will have limited appeal to most folks until that can be done.

[fergycool]

I keep doing some research on it, and getting a little bit further, but not too far....!

Here's what I know so far. There's a plugin called SC (softcam) for VDR. This runs fine, but you need a working installation of VDR first.

Then there's a plugin called SASC (Stand alone SC). This is a version of SC that is meant for connection to MythTV. It must be patched against MythTV, which will need recompiling of course.

here's some text from the README of SASC 0.6

What is sasc?
sasc is an application that allows using the vdr 'sc' plugin as a stand alone
executable. This gives you the capability to use the powerful softCam library
in programs other than vdr. In sasc-0.6, support has been additionally added to
support evocamd, which is a binary-only softcam.

Why did you write sasc?
sasc was written to give MythTV (www.mythtv.org) the ability to use SoftCAM to
decode channels. My original patch (based off work done by schiaparellit)
worked well for BEV and DishNetwork, however it didn't support any other
encoding schemes, nor did it have the full functionality of SC (it couldn't use
ROMs for instance). Looking to the future, it was going to be a lot of work to
maintain that patch given how rapidly myth changes, and the features that were
being requested (other encryption, decsa, etc). A member of the DVBN forum
(red321z) asked whether a stand alone sc could be built. My initial thoughts
were that it would be difficult because of sharing the dvb card between the SC
app and the stream decoder, but I then realized that there was not much overlap,
and decided to give it a shot.

One of these days I will install this. But finding info on the net is pretty hard. I think due to the possibility of illegal usage of MythTV. Although you're going to need this for legal usage as well as general CAM support is poor anyway under MythTV.

Cheers
Ferg

[BGonaSTICK]

Interesting, thanks. The mention of evocamd is sounding a lot more like it

Looks like a lot more development is required before a stable solution is produced though.

[jontydog]

Been having a look at VDR myself as cam support seems better than mythtv. As with myth I have it installed but can't get the bugger to work. If I can manage to get it running properly will investigate the cam side of things and report back,

[BGonaSTICK]

OK, nice one Jonty. Good luck with it

[satsid]

I have this,Skystar HD card.Its not a bad card for pc,she works just fine on HD signels.As a feedman iv not tryed pay tv,but im happy with what i can view from it.
sid

[BGonaSTICK]

Do you find it works the PC very hard when viewing HD channels? What sort of spec is your PC Sid?