Down with DishNetwork's DVR!

[sargenthp]

Hi,

I am sick of paying the $5.98 for each receiver for Dish Network to allow me to use the DVR capabilities of the receivers that I purchased.  What a rip off!

I was wondering if this would be possible...


I have 2 receivers from Dish Network, both having 2 TV feeds, for a total of 4 feeds.  Would I be able to setup one core LMCE system that connects to all 4 feeds, and be able to do the recording of our shows that we want?  Also will we be able to watch "live" tv on any feed that is not currently recording on a remote LMCE system connected to our TV and still do the pausing, fast-forwarding, and rewinding?

How many outputs can a LMCE system handle?  Can I connect 2+ TV's to one system, but watch different things?  If not, how minimal of a system could I use to display the feed?  Would a thin client work?

How many inputs can a LMCE system handle?


Hope I sort of make sense here.  Thanks!

Hil

[Hugolp]

The question you are asking is more a matter of hardware than a matter of software. The software can handle it? Yes, sure, no problem. Now, it depends on the hardware you buy it will be posible or not. I have a AMD Atholon 62 2x 3500 (thats dual core) with 2gig of RAM as server for watching TV and it can handle two channels at the same time without consuming half the RAM and not even 30% of the procesors. So I am guessing 4 channels wouldnt be that big isue.  Maybe youll have to be carefull with the hard drive speed, thats all. Also, you havent said how would you feed the signal from your "Dish Network" to the server. If you tell what kind of signal we'll tell you your best input hardware choice.

And once the signal is inside linuxmce you  can do all you want with it, in any computer arround the house thats conected (if the system has a good design).

Hugo

[sargenthp]

I didn't even think of the disk speed.  I suppose I could setup multiple drives.

The Dish Network receivers that I have have 2 different TV outputs.  TV1 has the options of standard coax out, s-video, digital audio, & RCA's.  TV2 had the options of standard coax out & RCA's only.  Here is a spec. sheet... http://www.dishnetwork.com/downloads/pdf/product_brochures/625_Prod_SheetWeb.pdf

I was thinking of just using the RCA's.

[Hugolp]

Ok. Two things here. I dont know at all about this system you are talking at all, but do you really need to use this machine? Because the best solution I see is to buy a satelite card for the computer. Maybe there is a reason why this cant be done.

If you really need to use this system then if you want to use the RCA youll need to buy pci cards that allow you to digitalize the signal. Some cheap cards just get the analog signal in and use the cpu power to do the mpeg conversion. The better (and more expensive) ones has dedicated mpeg chips that take the work from the cpu allowing the computer to run smoothly. I allways recomend the second ones, and if you want to have four inputs there is no other option.

In both cases you have to spend money in pci cards, thats why I think that if you can it would be better to get the satelite signal straight to the computer and forget about those machines.

Hugo

[MasterC]

Not sure what part of the planet you are from HugoLP, but in the US a satellite card won't work with our only 2 (small dish) satellite providers.  Not yet anyway, and not in Linux for some time I'm sure.

Sargenthp, you won't have any problems with most modern drives and 4 tuners simultaneously recording.  2 PVR-500s work just fine in standalone MythTV.  Actually I have 4 HD streams recording at the same time, that is probably as close to maximizing disk I/O as you can get without constant recording "blips"; every once in a while during fast moving scenes I do get "blips" when all 4 were recording at the same time.

What you will have problems with is how fast the system fills up

-Chad

[ddamron]

You could always set up a RAID system, that addresses both the speed and the size issues.
Hard Disks have come way down in price, might be worth checking into a hardware based raid sata card or even possibly a NAS server.

[Eirik]

Instead of buying PVR cards, firewire might be a better choice, specially if you want HDTV now or in the future.

http://www.diy-pvr-dvr-htpc.com/index.php/HDTV_Over_Firewire

Dish receivers: http://www.169time.com/

[MasterC]

You could always set up a RAID system, that addresses both the speed and the size issues.
Hard Disks have come way down in price, might be worth checking into a hardware based raid sata card or even possibly a NAS server.

There are several non-official discussions on this and they seem to suggest a SATA II standalone disk (on a SATA II controller) is *just as* fast on read and write and doesn't require the extra disk space, configuration or overhead.  And I don't know why but I'm just not as big of a fan of NAS for a MythTV as a lot of other people seem to be.  I can stuff 2TB of disks into a system that is going to always be on anyway, why do I want yet another apliance to always be on?

-Chad

[MasterC]

Instead of buying PVR cards, firewire might be a better choice, specially if you want HDTV now or in the future.

http://www.diy-pvr-dvr-htpc.com/index.php/HDTV_Over_Firewire

Dish receivers: http://www.169time.com/

Firewire is hit and miss WRT digital cable boxes.  The 169time options are windows centric and from what I have read it seems they may not work with Linux directly.  There are however some options out there that will work, they require physical hardware hacking a specific Dish Network receiver (the HD6000 IIRC?) but there has been some success.

-Chad

[Hugolp]

Not sure what part of the planet you are from HugoLP, but in the US a satellite card won't work with our only 2 (small dish) satellite providers.  Not yet anyway, and not in Linux for some time I'm sure.

From Barcelona. And as I said at the begining I never played with a Dish Network.

[MasterC]

Cool, one of the things I find most interesting about working with Open Source software is the diversity of people you get to meet.  I am not sure that my post sounded like I meant it too, it kind of sounds like I was being harsh.  I meant that to say where are you from, not in any derogatory way.

-Chad

[Hugolp]

Understood. Its all good.

Hugo

[sargenthp]

No problem.  Thanks for the replies. 

With baby #2 on the way moola will get really tight.  Won't be able to build this system for a while. 

[bluenadas]

There are DVB-S cards that work with Dish in the US.

I don't think they are supported via LMCE yet, or if they ever will be, but I use them on a different, windows based freeware MCE

[totallymaxed]

Well here in the UK we can easily record 20+ DVB-T standard digital terrestrial TV channels concurrently while watching 2-3 channels live and or playing a ripped DVD. Our Cores are typically 3Ghz Celeron's with 512mb-1Gb RAM and are typically based on i945 class motherboards. With this kind of level of activity at the core we typically see less than 30% processor usage. Obviously recording 30+ channels concurrently is not a likely scenario in normal domestic usage... but it gives you some metric on the capacity to load up a system.

Hope this helps

Andrew

Not sure what part of the planet you are from HugoLP, but in the US a satellite card won't work with our only 2 (small dish) satellite providers.  Not yet anyway, and not in Linux for some time I'm sure.

Sargenthp, you won't have any problems with most modern drives and 4 tuners simultaneously recording.  2 PVR-500s work just fine in standalone MythTV.  Actually I have 4 HD streams recording at the same time, that is probably as close to maximizing disk I/O as you can get without constant recording "blips"; every once in a while during fast moving scenes I do get "blips" when all 4 were recording at the same time.

What you will have problems with is how fast the system fills up

-Chad