My Linux Media Centre Satellite Set-Up

Adam792

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My Satellite Setup
Dishes: 80cm (5°W), 80cm (30°W), 60cm Zone 2 (13°E/19.2°E/28.2°E)
Receivers: HTPC w/ TBS6905 4x DVB-S2 PCIe tuner card running TVHeadend, Octagon SF8008 mini.
My Location
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Just thought I'd share my latest set-up.

I decided last year to move away from Enigma boxes, as I've always been slightly dissatisfied with the user experience on them. A lot of decent boxes exist but they're just not pleasant for watching and recording TV.

I looked into Kodi Media Centre (XBMC as was), and found out about the support for live TV via software like TVHeadend. My first dip into this was to set up an old mini PC I had lying around as a Freeview HD box with XBMC, TVHeadend and a PCTV Nano 290e USB DVB-T2 stick. This worked out pretty decently, and made me want to see if I could get all my satellite stuff on a similar set-up.

I ended up building a modest PC, Intel i3 processor, micro ATX motherboard (I would have gone smaller even but I needed more than 1 PCI-E slot for tuner cards as well as graphics), a DVBSky dual tuner DVB-S2 PCI-E card, and an nVidia GT630 graphics card (decent enough spec to handle full hardware decode of MPEG4 1080i50 with the best hardware supported deinterlacing and scaling methods). As I have a French BIS Télévisions card for 13°E, I also bought an Argolis Smargo USB card reader.

Since moving house, my set-up consists of an 80cm dish with monoblock for 13°E/19.2°E, plus the ubiquitous zone 1 minidish on 28.2°E left by the previous owners! The two dishes look like they overlap a little but I've not seen any signal degradation compared to when I've taken the minidish down, so it can stay as is as far as I'm concerned!

The set-up of the media centre PC itself has been a bit more tricky. The drivers for my DVBSky S2 card (s952) are fiddly with Linux; it's not properly supported in the kernel, and the third party versions from DVBSky themselves break support for my DVB-T2 USB stick (so I can't have terrestrial as well for now).

TVHeadend takes a bit of setting up as there are lots of options, but it's very powerful software and once you have everything as you want it it works very well. I use the nightly unstable version 3.9 builds as the older stable 3.4 version isn't good if you have lots of channels in the list (which is going to happen with several satellites tuned in!) For UK channels on 28.2°E, it can pull through the regional Freesat bouquet of your choice with channel numbers and over the air EPG all working very well. For the French BIS channels that only have over the air now and next EPG, with a bit of setting up XMLTV works very well to provide a full guide.

The Smargo cardreader was surprisingly easy to get working, being read by OSCam compiled for Ubuntu. I was able to tweak the config files I used in Enigma 2 just to work with the smartreader protocol, and it reads the BIS card fine. TVHeadend interfaces with OSCam via either newcamd or DVBAPI, but for me newcamd seems to work best. I also have TVHeadend connected via newcamd to DOSCAM running on a Raspberry Pi for Swiss and Austrian channels via emulator.

Kodi itself is fairly easy to get set-up once you've found the options to get the refresh rate to 50Hz and make sure the video is going through the best hardware decoding settings. Picture quality is very good, much better than Enigma 2 on both SD and HD channels, and the EPG works very nicely!

Dish cabling needs tidying up but I'm looking to replace the cable from the monoblock with shotgun cable for two feeds.
 

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timo_w2s

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Neat setup.

Isn't the media centre a bit noisy when running by the TV? How long does it take to boot up or do you leave it on?
 

Adam792

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My Satellite Setup
Dishes: 80cm (5°W), 80cm (30°W), 60cm Zone 2 (13°E/19.2°E/28.2°E)
Receivers: HTPC w/ TBS6905 4x DVB-S2 PCIe tuner card running TVHeadend, Octagon SF8008 mini.
My Location
Cheltenham
I leave it on so it can record stuff in the background (plus it's also used as a fileserver on our LAN).

I got a cheap case so it's noisier than it could be but not particularly, and I don't notice it!
 

marciano

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hi, show us more pictures of your machines. thank's.
 

Adam792

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My Satellite Setup
Dishes: 80cm (5°W), 80cm (30°W), 60cm Zone 2 (13°E/19.2°E/28.2°E)
Receivers: HTPC w/ TBS6905 4x DVB-S2 PCIe tuner card running TVHeadend, Octagon SF8008 mini.
My Location
Cheltenham
Just a quick update today.

Managed to get my 60cm ISS dish (a bit worse for wear with some rust on the arm) up on the wall for 30°W.

It's been a year since I last looked, and Spanish digital terrestrial has had a major move around since then, but most of the details I had about the TDT Abertis feeds on Hispasat still work!

Unfortunately my Linux machine is refusing to install VLC so I'm unable to view the channels as live (the method I used involved using VLC for BISS decryption then playing the transport stream), but recording the PID in TransEdit then offline decrypting works at least!
 

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benwiddowson82

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My Satellite Setup
80cm dish (Amiko Motor). Amiko Alien2+, Amiko Alien Mini, GigaBlue IPBOX, Ariva 203, Sky+HD 2TB, NC+, TNTSAT, MTV Unlimited Cards. Mac Mini, MacBook Pro.
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Loughborough, Liecestershire, UK
What distro are you using and what software produces that lovely epg?
Thanks
Ben
 

Adam792

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My Satellite Setup
Dishes: 80cm (5°W), 80cm (30°W), 60cm Zone 2 (13°E/19.2°E/28.2°E)
Receivers: HTPC w/ TBS6905 4x DVB-S2 PCIe tuner card running TVHeadend, Octagon SF8008 mini.
My Location
Cheltenham
What distro are you using and what software produces that lovely epg?
Thanks
Ben
I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with Kodi installed on top.

The EPG is just the default EPG that comes with Kodi, but I'm using the Xperience1080 Kodi skin which makes it look like that. It is definitely the nicest looking EPG of all I've tried! I've experimented with various other Kodi skins and none of them are as nice for live TV.

For me though I think a media centre solution running Kodi has worked out to be much better than Enigma 2 boxes. the UI on Dreamboxes etc. is just shoddy and while Kodi isn't perfect, it can look and work pretty nicely and TVHeadend is an amazing piece of software.

I do find that Kodi needs a reboot fairly often to keep it working nicely though - It will lose the EPG from TVHeadend after a few days (rebooting the program brings it back).

A few more screenshots (from my Wetek Play also running Kodi - this just connects to the TVHeadend server on my PC and streams the channels in full satellite/terrestrial quality over my local network - it even works without glitching on WiFi!):
 

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Adam792

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My Satellite Setup
Dishes: 80cm (5°W), 80cm (30°W), 60cm Zone 2 (13°E/19.2°E/28.2°E)
Receivers: HTPC w/ TBS6905 4x DVB-S2 PCIe tuner card running TVHeadend, Octagon SF8008 mini.
My Location
Cheltenham
I eventually switched over to TBS cards for sat and terrestrial including multistream S2 support.

Changed my dish set-up slightly again in the last couple of months too.

One 80cm dish is still on 5°W for French and Italian DVB-T via multistream, and the other 80cm is now on 30°W for Spanish DVB-T feeds. The Sky minidish is on 19.2°E for the couple of French channels that aren't yet available by multistream (TF1, M6 etc), and I just use the DVB-T2 card for UK channels.

Got it sorted so I can tune the Abertis transponders on Hispasat via TVHeadend, pass the full transponder on to be processed via the command line (with VLC and a couple of other tools) and output the multiplex to my network as a UDP stream which TVHeadend can tune in.

These channels are FTA in Spain and I'm making use of them to help me learn Spanish. I have my GCSE exam next month after taking night classes at a local college. :D In a couple of years they should be a bit easier to receive as a move to DVB-S2 T2-MI has been hinted at (they did tests using this a year or so ago on 30°W).
 

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Adam792

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My Satellite Setup
Dishes: 80cm (5°W), 80cm (30°W), 60cm Zone 2 (13°E/19.2°E/28.2°E)
Receivers: HTPC w/ TBS6905 4x DVB-S2 PCIe tuner card running TVHeadend, Octagon SF8008 mini.
My Location
Cheltenham
There is a brand new Linux T2-MI tool available
DXtv.de | TV-Karten für den PC | T2-MI tool für Linux
which simply links to here
GitHub - newspaperman/t2-mi: This is a commandline T2-MI baseband frame extractor

The cpp file is quite small.

That's interesting! Thanks, I'll take a look.

The current format of the Spanish feeds is very similar to T2-MI as far as I understand from what I've read (only a little).

Each DVB-T multiplex is transmitted as a single data PID on the transponder.

These have the added complication of that data PID being encrypted in BISS, so they have to be decrypted and then have the TS headers stripped to leave a full multiplex TS (otherwise you have a TS within a TS which nothing will play as it just looks like data!)
 

Adam792

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My Satellite Setup
Dishes: 80cm (5°W), 80cm (30°W), 60cm Zone 2 (13°E/19.2°E/28.2°E)
Receivers: HTPC w/ TBS6905 4x DVB-S2 PCIe tuner card running TVHeadend, Octagon SF8008 mini.
My Location
Cheltenham
Thought I'd upload a few new pictures of my dishes too!

First I've got my 80cm on 30°W along with the Sky minidish which is back on 28.2°E as we have Sky TV now (there was a decent deal on for 12 months of everything). Second there's my other 80cm on 5°W along with my old 60cm on a tripod for 19.2°E.

5°W, 19.2°E and a single feed from the minidish LNB (28.2°E) go into a 4 way DiSEqC switch and 30°W goes directly into tuner 2 of my PC Card.

All a bit temporary but we're moving in a couple of months and I think my new setup will have the two 80cm dishes as now and then a zone 2 minidish for 13°E, 19.2°E and 28.2°E.
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Lazarus

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Several small Dishes.
Much else.
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Nice.

My own house is similarly festooned with an array of dishes used for purposes which, in some cases, the rationale for is lost in the mists of time!
 

Adam792

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My Satellite Setup
Dishes: 80cm (5°W), 80cm (30°W), 60cm Zone 2 (13°E/19.2°E/28.2°E)
Receivers: HTPC w/ TBS6905 4x DVB-S2 PCIe tuner card running TVHeadend, Octagon SF8008 mini.
My Location
Cheltenham
Decided today I'd do a quick zapping video of some of the channels I get through my TVHeadend/Kodi set-up. For some reason on Windows none of the picons for a lot of the channels have been pulled through.

 

Captain Jack

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Very cool. Does that BIS TV card still work?
 

Adam792

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My Satellite Setup
Dishes: 80cm (5°W), 80cm (30°W), 60cm Zone 2 (13°E/19.2°E/28.2°E)
Receivers: HTPC w/ TBS6905 4x DVB-S2 PCIe tuner card running TVHeadend, Octagon SF8008 mini.
My Location
Cheltenham
Very cool. Does that BIS TV card still work?

No I probably haven't updated my profile in a while! My BIS card lapsed about a year ago. My TNTSat card works again now since the configs for the pairing were published, but in general I don't have much use for it as I use the FTA multistream stuff!


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Ghostleader

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80cm motorised Inverto dish with Dark Motor full metal gears, Xtrend 9500HD, Amiko Alien 2+, Amiko Alien 8900, Moded Zone 2 dish with multi LNB goodness! 50 inch full HD LCD and loads of other stuff! lol
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All a bit temporary but we're moving in a couple of months and I think my new setup will have the two 80cm dishes as now and then a zone 2 minidish for 13°E, 19.2°E and 28.2°E.


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Zone 2 works well for this spread, are you thinking about buying a new Zone 2 MK4 dish for this purpose then??

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Adam792

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My Satellite Setup
Dishes: 80cm (5°W), 80cm (30°W), 60cm Zone 2 (13°E/19.2°E/28.2°E)
Receivers: HTPC w/ TBS6905 4x DVB-S2 PCIe tuner card running TVHeadend, Octagon SF8008 mini.
My Location
Cheltenham
Another video, this time of my set-up to watch TV, with the Wetek Play 2 connected to the 4k TV.

French and Italian multistream on 5°W, HD+ and a couple of TNT SAT channels on 19.2°E, SRG Switzerland on 13°E, ERT/Digea on 3.1°E and Spanish TDT SAT on 30°W. Then a few of the test 4k channels from all of them. The UK channels in my list are via terrestrial.

I did the picons myself as I'm a bit of a control freak so I wanted control of exactly how they look :D Need to update iTélé to CNEWS!

 

Adam792

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My Satellite Setup
Dishes: 80cm (5°W), 80cm (30°W), 60cm Zone 2 (13°E/19.2°E/28.2°E)
Receivers: HTPC w/ TBS6905 4x DVB-S2 PCIe tuner card running TVHeadend, Octagon SF8008 mini.
My Location
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Zone 2 works well for this spread, are you thinking about buying a new Zone 2 MK4 dish for this purpose then??

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Already have the zone 2 dish. It's sat with 19.2°E and 13°E on it. Not got round to re-adding 28.2 yet!
 

Captain Jack

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Er.... did I see analogue Nagravision encryption on Canal+ channel there?!
 

Adam792

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My Satellite Setup
Dishes: 80cm (5°W), 80cm (30°W), 60cm Zone 2 (13°E/19.2°E/28.2°E)
Receivers: HTPC w/ TBS6905 4x DVB-S2 PCIe tuner card running TVHeadend, Octagon SF8008 mini.
My Location
Cheltenham
Er.... did I see analogue Nagravision encryption on Canal+ channel there?!

Yes! On Canal+ via terrestrial (and so also 5°W Multistream) they've decided to start simulating the old analogue Nagravision encryption during the encrypted times, to try and make people curious and want to subscribe apparently... The idea has been widely slated on French forums!
 
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