Smith P, about using the DVB Card? Does the PC have to be a very powerful one? Mine is 3 yrs old running XP home on 512 Mb of RAM w/ a 2 Ghz Celeron only. I would assume is enough just for analizing the stream , I do not even plan on using it as a PVR or anything? I can not afford to make this hobby more expensive than it is already.
Using a PCI card for SD or with TSREADER for either analysis or even for streaming HD to another device like Roku or PCH, you could probably get by with a much slower computer. I'm using a PC that's somewhere around 7 to 10 years old (can't remember), and it is around 1.8 GHz. I can play SD 4.2.0 and 4.2.2 on the computer, and it will do some low bitrate HD, but chokes badly on high bitrate HD. It streams any speed HD however without a problem.
Iceberg, How Do you find the DVB-S2 feeds since this CS 8100 does not have blind scan? If I want a C-Band Dish to be motorised for this 8PSK , then it will probably have to be even bigger as the motorised setup is more likely not perfectly aligned as a fixed dish is?. Your thoughts or anyone on this, please?.
Re finding DVB-S2... It doesn't always work, but I use an old Broadlogic 1030 pci card and a program that generates a spectrum of the satellite band. You can easily see where there are transponders being used, and if they don't show up in a blind scan, then they might be other modes, like DCII, or Trellis 8PSK, but they also might be DVB-S2. I take an analog receiver and tune that to the frequency of the unknown signal, then feed the baseband video into a SW receiver, and you'll get a signal corresponding to the SR of that signal. I then see if it's DVB-S2 using either the TT3200, which will lock without specifying the FEC/pilot parameters, and if it IS an S2 signals, then I can use one of my other S2 receivers (like CS 8100 Diamond 9000, Azbox) to determine the FEC and pilot. Somewhat cumbersome, but I don't have room for a blind scan receiver.
OFF topic (as usual, lol) I noticed that at least with the HD stuff from any PBS on 125W the audio tracks are only DD 2.0 not 5.1. Yet on my Bell TV subs , PBS Boston has DD 5.1 audio on the same show. Is it a CS 8100 issue? I am using an optical cable to an Onkyo 605 and I set DD as digital audio option on the CS menu. The box is supposed just to read and stream DD through the S/PDIF optical without even touching the audio track, right?.
Interesting. Using Tsreader right now on the 125W signals, it shows the PBS signals as being :
AC3: Mode complete main Coding 2/0 L, R
AC3: Dolby Surround Mode Not Dolby Surround
AC3: LFE Mode Off Dialogue normalization -24 dB
I assume that the 2/0 coding must correspond to what you're describing as the DD 2.0 ?? I don't know much about Dolby digital. What I have noticed though, is that most PBS programs work fine through regular L/R speakers, however on some programs, I seem to have to hook up the audio through a surround sound system to hear all the audio. I've been assumming that this has just been a situation where all the PBS audio is in 5.1 mode, but that usually the dialog is in the L/R channels, but sometimes the dialog is in the center channel. However what you're describing makes me think that perhaps even though it's AC3, that perhaps most of it isn't really in 5.1 ???
I don't know much about 5.1. I thought that AC3 and 5.1 were the same, but I guess not? Guess I need to do more reading.