installation questions

[broadleon]

Hi all 

I'm new to linuxmce, and im confused a bit by certian installation how to's? Any Help would be apreciated!

1. I'm buying an array of tv capture because i want to watch tv (freeview+sat) and record, my plan is to have a core in the spare room and a MD in the living room. so i presume that the capture card goes in the core and all the tv from this gets transmitted through the network cat6e/5e to the MD, and the MD video's out to the tv, right?

2. i have a sky box with rs232 connector + a free to view sat box with rs232  so two usb to rs232 cables will connect that up to the core, but how do you take video signal from say the sky box and add it to the core?

Many thanks and sorry if these questions sound dumb, but im partially blind and have trouble reading the forums sometimes.

[totallymaxed]

Hi all 

I'm new to linuxmce, and im confused a bit by certian installation how to's? Any Help would be apreciated!

Welcome to LinuxMCE :-)

1. I'm buying an array of tv capture because i want to watch tv (freeview+sat) and record, my plan is to have a core in the spare room and a MD in the living room. so i presume that the capture card goes in the core and all the tv from this gets transmitted through the network cat6e/5e to the MD, and the MD video's out to the tv, right?

Yes alls the TV cards/Capture cards are best located centrally in the Core. Other external devices like your Sky box or maybe a Bluray player can be located either alongside your Core or near an MD so that they can be externally controlled.

2. i have a sky box with rs232 connector + a free to view sat box with rs232  so two usb to rs232 cables will connect that up to the core, but how do you take video signal from say the sky box and add it to the core?

You Sky box is not controllable via its rs232 connector (thats for repair/service only)...this is also very likely to be true of the Freesat box too. In the case of Sky you can control it via the RF2 socket on the back using a special interface or by using IR blasters and with the Freesat box you will probably have to use IR Blasters. The video output of either of these could be captured using video capture cards and then that video could be either recorded or streamed to your Core or MD. However the quality of the video will suffer degradation in the capture process and in general we find people are unhappy with the results.

We tend to favour controlling the Sky box and then sending the video output to other TV's over additional CAT5 cables. We then use an MD to switch the input on the TV to watch the Sky box. Picture quality is retained this way and you can see the Sky boxes UI on screen when you are watching it - the downside is the additional cables needed.

Many thanks and sorry if these questions sound dumb, but im partially blind and have trouble reading the forums sometimes.

No problem. Ask more questions if you need to.

All the best

Andrew

[broadleon]

totallymaxed:

We tend to favour controlling the Sky box and then sending the video output to other TV's over additional CAT5 cables. We then use an MD to switch the input on the TV to watch the Sky box. Picture quality is retained this way and you can see the Sky boxes UI on screen when you are watching it - the downside is the additional cables needed.

How do you do send sky video out signal over cat5 with no capture card

On my free to air sat box i have 2000 channels world wide (and there still nothing new to watch) i checked with manufactures and you can control with rs232, i wasn't sure about sky, i have a sky card all paid for, if i want to migrate to a satellite capture card can anyone sugest a CAM slot that would be compatiable with MCE.

Thanks

[broadleon]

I've found the answer to my question!

The Use of video to cat5 convertors! and boy are they expensive....

Wouldn't a scart to s-video cable pluged into WinTV-PVR-150 work? any quality loss?

[merkur2k]

the PVR-x50 cards have excellent quality for SD capture, but youll certainly experience a quality loss if you are pulling from an HD source.

[broadleon]

well i have no plans for HD at the moment.

Just being able to record freeview and satellite is a bonus at the moment.

[totallymaxed]

totallymaxed:

We tend to favour controlling the Sky box and then sending the video output to other TV's over additional CAT5 cables. We then use an MD to switch the input on the TV to watch the Sky box. Picture quality is retained this way and you can see the Sky boxes UI on screen when you are watching it - the downside is the additional cables needed.

How do you do that? i mean send sky video out signal over cat5 with no capture card

On my free to air sat box i have 2000 channels world wide (and there still nothing new to watch) i checked with manufactures and you can control with rs232, i wasn't sure about sky, i have a sky card all paid for, if i want to migrate to a satellite capture card can anyone sugest a CAM slot that would be compatiable with MCE.

Thanks

You would use HDMI-CAT5 converters (one to 'send' and one to 'receive') which can be purchased for around 50-60UKP a pair or if your Sky box has Composite/RGB then their about 35UKP a pair. Basically you can pretty much run any kind of signal over CAT5 and that makes your cabling cheaper, simpler to install and in the long run more flexible (later you could use the CAT5 for other purposes).

If your Freesat box has a working rs232 and your manufacturer will provide the control codes and other info needed to use it then that is the best route to control it externally. The other route of course for Freesat is to install DVB-S2 tuners in your Core (these are not 'capture cards' they receive the satellite signal directly just as your Freesat box does now) which will ultimately give you more flexibility as the watching/recording of TV can be managed internally by software such as MythTV or vdr.

Because of legal restrictions we cannot discuss here in this forum anything to do with using your Sky viewing card in non-sky hardware. Google is your friend in these circumstances.

All the best

Andrew

[totallymaxed]

well i have no plans for HD at the moment.

Just being able to record freeview and satellite is a bonus at the moment.

Then even for SD you will see an enormous difference in picture quality if you use DVB-T and/or DVB-S tuner cards in your Core and have it receive the broadcasts directly. That way everything stays digital all the way. Using any kind of capture card will degrade the picture quality for no advantage.

Myhome system for example has 4 x DVB-T tuners currently. In the UK DVB-T is broadcast using 6 frequencies at each transmitter. Each frequency carries one Multiplex (or MUX) of channels. So on a given MUX you might have 6-8 TV 'channels' and up to 20 'Radio' channels. So with 4 x DVB-T tuners in my Core i can receive 4 of the 6 MUX's at any given time...but it gets more interesting than that because once I have tuned one of my tuners to say MUX 'A' to watch BBC1 I can also access all of the other 'channels' on MUX 'A' using the same tuner. I only need to use another tuner if i want to watch or record a channel from another MUX.

This is enormously powerful as it means that anyone in the house can watch/record pretty much any channel without limitation (with 6 x DVB-T tuner you would have total freedom). My home Core of an evening might have 10+ recordings running in parallel at some points in the evening as everyone in the house watches/record their favorite shows. You just cant do that with anything else...Sky+ runs out of tuners at two concurrent recordings...as do other PVR's.

In 0810 we plan to support mixed DVB-T & DVB-S installations so that you can have a mix of both types of tuners in a single Core.

All the best

Andrew

[broadleon]

But is there a satelite tuner card that supports dish motors?
 
My current setup has a 2 meter wide dish with a motor to pick up an array of satelites on the dish there is 4 LNB's (please no questions on where i managed to get a two meter dish with a motor attached, it was a import from america) EXTREME I KNOW
on my box i have two cam slots in use, i dont think linuxmce can match this just yet.

my question on cam a slot was nothing to do with sky it was more refering to buying a smart card to pick up certian channels

question? how do you manage to get 6xDVB-T tuners and a extra gig network port is there a motherboard out there for all that? or is this where MD'S come into play?

[broadleon]

ok i have another question,  if the s-video input on the PVR-x50 cards works the for example, 'sky box' and there is a ir blaster controling it, how does linuxmce know which channels you have on your sky box? is this where some manual work comes into play?

[totallymaxed]

But is there a satelite tuner card that supports dish motors?
 
My current setup has a 2 meter wide dish with a motor to pick up an array of satelites on the dish there is 4 LNB's (please no questions on where i managed to get a two meter dish with a motor attached, it was a import from america) EXTREME I KNOW
on my box i have two cam slots in use, i dont think linuxmce can match this just yet.

my question on cam a slot was nothing to do with sky it was more refering to buying a smart card to pick up certian channels

question? how do you manage to get 6xDVB-T tuners and a extra gig network port is there a motherboard out there for all that? or is this where MD'S come into play?

The size of the dish you use is really irrelevant to how many LNB's or the positioning systems used to direct it. Vdr & Mythtv support dish positioning as standard and they can both work with DVB-S cards that support multiple CAM's - nothing special there at all. But as i said earlier this forum is not the place to discuss anything to do with CAM's or using viewing cards with them of any flavour - Sky or otherwise.

You can use a multi slot motherboard or USB Dual tuners (3 x Dual tuners gets you everything). See my Wiki article here on the Kworld 399T Dual Tuner http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Kworld_KW-DVB-T_399U. We use the Kworld 399T in an extension chassis for racked installations.

All the best

Andrew

[totallymaxed]

ok i have another question,  if the s-video input on the PVR-x50 cards works the for example, 'sky box' and there is a ir blaster controling it, how does linuxmce know which channels you have on your sky box? is this where some manual work comes into play?

What we do in our installs is we allow users to control the Sky box through IR or RF2. When they select one of their Sky boxes (there is no limit apart from cost as to how many Sky boxes we can control) they see the video output on ther MD's screen. They have full access to the Sky boxes UI using the MCE remote...so they can use the Sky Guides EPG and have full access to every feature of say a Sky+ or SkyHD box, including recording on the internal hard discs or recording to the Core's internal hard drives or any other storage attached to the LAN.

Andrew

[broadleon]

Ok I finally understand how it works now I don’t suppose anyone has realized how handy linuxmce is for a wheelchair user, one remote does all! This is a disabled users dream!

If you have for example, say 6 capture cards/tuners what kind of processor do you need? I understand that a lot of the tuners cards have mpeg-2 and don’t rely on CPU usage but I’m imaging that the more pci/pci-e c**p you add to your core the faster the CPU should be..?

Bare minimum would be a dual core of say 2.2 GHz?

[totallymaxed]

Ok I finally understand how it works now I don’t suppose anyone has realized how handy linuxmce is for a wheelchair user, one remote does all! This is a disabled users dream!

If you have for example, say 6 capture cards/tuners what kind of processor do you need? I understand that a lot of the tuners cards have mpeg-2 and don’t rely on CPU usage but I’m imaging that the more pci/pci-e c**p you add to your core the faster the CPU should be..?

Bare minimum would be a dual core of say 2.2 GHz?

I think LinuxMCE has a lot to offer disabled users from a lot of different perspectives...control of and monitoring of the home environment from where eve they happen to be is an incredible liberation for these users - and is not a gimmick at all.

Well as i said earlier in this thread I would not recommend using a capture card full stop. But if your set on it then make sure the capture cards have hardware mpeg2 encoders...then disc I/O, heat and power usage will be your main problems. A fast Dual Core processor will help you for sure.

Andrew