Looking for FTA Receiver with recording

[ikki]

Specificly I want something that has an internal hard drive, or that can use a built in ethernet port to save the recorded output file to a fileserver.

I love my Pansat 9200HD, however its worthless for recording tv. More often that not I have to turn off the unit and turn it back on to init the esata drive and when I tried recording Lost last night it managed to hose that file as well.

 

[Anole]

possiblities:

Did you mean...
Hi Def? Look for comments on the Coolsat 8100 and see if it suits you.
Standard Def? Get a Visionsat IV-200. Works for me. (see signature)
And if you meant OTA recordings, well, I've given up on that.

Internal drives are rare, and not cost effective.
I haven't found any which will record to a remote network drive.

Have you considered a computer-based solution?

 

[boomer_106]

Specificly I want something that has an internal hard drive, or that can use a built in ethernet port to save the recorded output file to a fileserver.

I love my Pansat 9200HD, however its worthless for recording tv. More often that not I have to turn off the unit and turn it back on to init the esata drive and when I tried recording Lost last night it managed to hose that file as well.

I've got a pansat 9200. I haven't set it up for recording yet. Can you elaborate on the problems you have had? How did it hose your "lost" recording? Have you tried recording any OTA HD? Does it record anything?

 

[ikki]

Boomer_106 Let me explain further.

When I speak of recording I speak both of recording over the air ATSC (HDTV) and FTA satellite.

I have been able to record other shows successfully, the bug that that seems to plague me has something to do with timing or file size. (I am not sure which)

When I hit the record button and walk away for 3 hours and come back then hit the stop button the receiver acts like every thing is fine.

When I go to watch the show it only shows a 15 min fragment of the show but that fragment is repeated for the entire time duration.

When I record any thing under 3 hours it works flawlessly, although there is still no way to review the recorded programming outside of having it connect to the Pansat receiver.

 

[ikki]

> I've got a pansat 9200. I haven't set it up for recording yet. Can you >elaborate on the problems you have had? How did it hose your "lost" >recording? Have you tried recording any OTA HD? Does it record anything?

As long as the program is under 2 hours (From what I can determine) it will record fine.

It realy appears that it may be tied to a 4 gigabyte file limitation.

As I mentioned in another post, the folks at Pansat are using a hacked / modified version of Fat32.

Pansat needs to get with the program and use a modern day file system, perhaps something available in the open source world.

Based on my observations I would NOT purchase another Pansat PVR.

In response to the second part of your question, what does the PVR do to recordings over 2 hours? It looses sync, so while the file is entirely there only 1 hour or so is viewable and it ends up putting that segment into an endless loop untill it gets to the end of the 2 or 3 hour file. Completely worthless.

I would like to see other try the same experiment. Record something for 3 hours and then forward though it and watch it loop.

 

[Das Hammer]

Dreambox 800 will give you HD and allow you to record over the network or to an internal 2.5" Sata drive.

Cons: No blind scan, but you've already got the 9200 for that. No ATSC tuner.

---------

Or, build a MythTV or MediaPortal system. It's a lot of fun.

 

[ikki]

What I am thinking of doing is getting a Blackmagic Design - Intensity HDMI in and HDMI out capture card and recording everything on the PC using Windows XP.

 

[dunnsept]

Blackmagic makes great stuff, but make sure your PC can handle it.
I've got a Blackmagic Decklink inside a quad-core 2.6Ghz with Sata RAID and my hard drives are not fast enough to capture HDMI HD.
1080 HD through HDMI on my decklink needs 120MB per second. My sata raid was only able to sustain about 95 MB/S so captures never worked properly. to hit that rate with some room left over, you'll need at least 5 drives in a stripe set.. OR you'll need to go to SAS drives.. different department where I work has a stripe of 4 SAS 15000 RPM drives that can do 400MB/sec
HTH

 

[ikki]

Dunnsept - Thanks for that information. Its def good to know, so now I will have to be upgrading as well.

 

[14karat]

dunnsept, what was your SATA array setup for the 95MB/s?

 

[boomer_106]

> I've got a pansat 9200. I haven't set it up for recording yet. Can you >elaborate on the problems you have had? How did it hose your "lost" >recording? Have you tried recording any OTA HD? Does it record anything?

As long as the program is under 2 hours (From what I can determine) it will record fine.

It realy appears that it may be tied to a 4 gigabyte file limitation.

As I mentioned in another post, the folks at Pansat are using a hacked / modified version of Fat32.

Pansat needs to get with the program and use a modern day file system, perhaps something available in the open source world.

Based on my observations I would NOT purchase another Pansat PVR.

In response to the second part of your question, what does the PVR do to recordings over 2 hours? It looses sync, so while the file is entirely there only 1 hour or so is viewable and it ends up putting that segment into an endless loop untill it gets to the end of the 2 or 3 hour file. Completely worthless.

I would like to see other try the same experiment. Record something for 3 hours and then forward though it and watch it loop.

Thanks for your reply. That's good information. With the things I've been hearing about it's recording ability, I'm not in that big of a hurry to get it set up. Mine is one of the older series that needs the modification on their website to be able to record. It involves turning a microscopic chip on the board. I can't believe how small that thing is. Other than that I could send it to Pansat and let them do it but, I hate to be without my HD box.

 

[dunnsept]

14K, those are Samsung Spinpoint drives, 4 total in a sort of double stripe. I can't do more drives than that due to the board/controller I have.
commercial solutions I looked at for video capture with the blackmagic were usually 8 SATA drives with dual controllers (4 per of course) and then you had to stripe to get the necessary speed. 8 drives should get you about 300 MB/sec.

If anybody wants to run some speed tests, I have some on my work machine, otherwise look for HDTune, or IOmeter. blackmagic also has one that breaks it down nicely, showing the speed on your drive and then what frame rate you can expect to capture for each of the resolutions

 

[Tron]

Blackmagic makes great stuff, but make sure your PC can handle it.
I've got a Blackmagic Decklink inside a quad-core 2.6Ghz with Sata RAID and my hard drives are not fast enough to capture HDMI HD.
1080 HD through HDMI on my decklink needs 120MB per second. My sata raid was only able to sustain about 95 MB/S so captures never worked properly. to hit that rate with some room left over, you'll need at least 5 drives in a stripe set.. OR you'll need to go to SAS drives.. different department where I work has a stripe of 4 SAS 15000 RPM drives that can do 400MB/sec
HTH

Are you running a Decklink HD or Decklink SD? SD SDI supposedly requires a four drive RAID 0, although I've done it with 3 SATA drives under RAID 0. HD SDI (or HDMI) without using compression on the capture requires a fibre channel-connected RAID array running 9 drives to deal with uncompressed HD...

 

[14karat]

Reason I was asking, (where I work) we've started speed testing with dual iSCSI targets, each running a 6 drive SATA array.
Both have dual 10G nics on a private 10G LAN (this is CAT6, not fiber)
We don't have any speed results yet... in fact, we're questioning if it's worth it as we've already had 3 drive failures and haven't even gotten very deep into the project...

 

[gillham]

What I am thinking of doing is getting a Blackmagic Design - Intensity HDMI in and HDMI out capture card and recording everything on the PC using Windows XP.

Umm, why? You can simply buy a PCI/PCIe tuner (DVB-S2 and/or ATSC) and you should be able to collect any signal available to the Pansat. Oh, and you can use 4:2:2 content, which the Pansat can't touch. You're then saving it to disk in the *already compressed* state. The bitrate is unlikely to exceed 80Mbit/sec and a single inexpensive drive can keep up with 10MB/sec.

In my opinion it would not make any sense to decode the compressed stream to HDMI, capture the HDMI on a horrendously expensive PC setup, just to turn around and try to recompress it to something you can archive somehow.

So my suggestion would be to look at a cheap ($200 or less) DVB-S2 tuner rather than a $6,000 pansat + PC HDMI capture solution.

 

[ikki]

Gillham, point me in the right direction for a 4.2.2 receiver.

I should add, back in March of 2008 I made the mistake of purchasing an ATI Wonder 650 PCI card.

The software sucks, and the best resolution I can hope to achieve is via the S- Video port.

Which is why I was so pleased to read about the Pansat 9200 HD.

Imagine an FTA receiver with killer ATSC reception and the ability to record to an external ESATA hard drive.

Needless to say I was sold a bill of good with regards to the PVR.

But I do digress

Thanks again to every one who responded

 

[gillham]

Gillham, point me in the right direction for a 4.2.2 receiver.

Look at the Technotrend S2-3200 PCI card. Also check out the PC DVB sub-forum.

On the PC side, the 4:2:2 processing is a software function, not related to the tuner card itself. You can find Windows software for it, otherwise mplayer under Linux works.