Anyone gotten a dvb card to work with SKY satellite. Im in italy.

[elboy0712]

I want to dump my SKY box if I can and use a dvb card. If anyone has one working what model of card do you have? Does ti support surround sound? Is there a HD version? is there anything I should know about getting it to work. I may also be ok with being able to control the box with rs-232 if it allows me to see the guides.

[sp00nhead]

SkY systems need the sky box as most for the channels that aren't on freeview are encrypted and the only decoders are in the sky boxes.
The rs232 ports on the sky boxes only out put the info of the current channel playing, can't be used to control the boxes

[nite_man]

VDR which has only base integration with LinuxMCE, provides a way to record TV show using Sky box - Sky-plugin -

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http://www.linuxtv.org/vdrwiki/index.php/Sky-plugin. You need to connect the analog a/v output of your Sky Digibox to VDR. So, it allows to full recording flexibility of VDR with your valid Sky subscription.

[sp00nhead]

nite_man: Have you got this working under lmce?
I'm planning on seting up my sky box. I've got a PVR-150 and have started to set it upo under the lmce admin panel and have added the sky box on there(ir control via a gc100 unit) Not really spent much time on it let. But if VDR works better then i might invest some time looking into that and try and help getting vdr working better in lmce.

[nite_man]

I didn't make VDR working under neither Plutohome or LinuxMCE. But people in that forum reported that they managed to setup VDR with LinuxMCE. I played a bit with VDR itself and it seems better than MythTV (compare the list of plug-ins) especially for Europe.

You can install and configure VDR as standalone application in your Kubuntu and play with it. The weak integration VDR with LinuxMCE is a bad but at the same time a good. Because you can install and configure VDR without LinuxMCE and after you test VDR  install LinuxMCE-VDR plug-in and try to use VDR via LinuxMCE.

[falcorn]

You can install a dvb budget card (like skystar) or a full features dvb card (like hauppauge). the difference between this two is that budget acrd require an mpeg decoder using software, full features have mpeg decoder inside for best performans. then you can use a card reader like smartmouse/phoenix to read the card. finally you need to use an emu like cccam or newcs to enable vdr or mythtv to read data from the card and decript channels

[totallymaxed]

nite_man: Have you got this working under lmce?
I'm planning on seting up my sky box. I've got a PVR-150 and have started to set it upo under the lmce admin panel and have added the sky box on there(ir control via a gc100 unit) Not really spent much time on it let. But if VDR works better then i might invest some time looking into that and try and help getting vdr working better in lmce.

We have Sky integrated with vdr & MythTV inside our Dianemo & Cascade products. The vdr integration that is currently in 0710 & 0810 I dont think incorporates our changes though as the devs decided to go a different route. Basically we have the following integrated;

For VDR we have;

- DVB-T SD Only
- DVB-S SD only

Sky Digibox, Sky+ & Sky+ HD are available as SD & HD full quality using HDMI-CAT5 to allow each Sky box to be routed to an MD or multiple MD's (allows your MCE remote or touch screen to control the Sky UI)

For MythTV we have;

- DVB-T SD only
- DVB-S SD + HD

Sky Digibox, Sky+ & Sky+ HD are available as either SD streams or as SD & HD full quality using HDMI-CAT5 to allow each Sky box to be routed to an MD or multiple MD's (allows your MCE remote or touch screen to control the Sky UI and provides the Sky off-air EPG data in the MythTV Guide)

All the best

Andrew