West coast dealer recommendations?
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I’m British by birth, have dual citizenship. I travel back-and-forth, I guess I’ll have to pick one eventually, when I retire
My plan is to get something working using one of FTA DVB-S satellites visible here. My interest isn’t in receiving the FTA satellites with a north American footprint, except to test. I already have s cable subscription, and only speak English
I have a Sky Q subscription already at my UK location, but that’s only useful when I’m there, and with the pandemic travel restrictions that hasn’t been much in the past couple of years. I’m thinking of cancelling my (expensive) Sky subscription, and using Freesat instead (same orbital slot).
If I can figure out a way to still enjoy UK TV when I’m not physically in the UK, that would be icing on the cake, hence the interest in DVR. Multiple tuners because the UK channels still insist on scheduling ‘the good stuff’ in competing slots during prime time, and shows don’t repeat nearly as much as they do on U.S. networks, so conflicts are much more common. From experience, with two tuners, I get occasional conflicts, with four I don’t.
I subscribe to Britbox, AcornTV, etc. in the U.S. but it’s ‘UK TV for an American Audience’, not the same at all. Ditto with BBC America.
Ok, now i think that I understand. The hardware is being installed in the UK and you view the recordings or live streams here in the US?
With the way that these orbital slots are managed, European satellite viewers don't have the same requirements for bliindscan as transponder table are actively and reliably updated.
With the way that these orbital slots are managed, European satellite viewers don't have the same requirements for bliindscan as transponder table are actively and reliably updated.
Yep, I expect it'll only be recordings, because of the time difference. Recordings are useful on those long flights too, cut off from the world for 12+ hours. Even if I'm traveling in Europe, the state of hotel WiFi isn't usually that great, so a recording works better.
Paul_C - for this use case, you may want to consider using a PC running Linux with a TBS tuner card. Many threads here about it. That way you'll get the number of tuners you want AND you'll have the horsepower to transcode the recordings to a reasonable size for upload. You could even run the tuner card, TVHeadend, and Plex all on the same box, and let Plex worry about transcoding.
I have not attempted remote streaming of satellite, but I do it regularly with over-the-air antenna TV. Similar to your use case, I stream remotely from an HDHomeRun ATSC tuner and Plex server I have located in a nearby major city. Raw HD channels can often be 10+ Mbps, too much for the average residential internet upload speed in the US, so I found it was essential to have a fairly modern PC with sufficient processing power to transcode it down to 3-4 Mbps 720p.
I have not attempted remote streaming of satellite, but I do it regularly with over-the-air antenna TV. Similar to your use case, I stream remotely from an HDHomeRun ATSC tuner and Plex server I have located in a nearby major city. Raw HD channels can often be 10+ Mbps, too much for the average residential internet upload speed in the US, so I found it was essential to have a fairly modern PC with sufficient processing power to transcode it down to 3-4 Mbps 720p.
I only have 10 to 15 Mbs upload but can stream ChannelsDvr just fine online to remote locations. Have not found a way to do it on Sat, except dvbviewer pro, it works well with a front end to stream remotely.
Here's some more info I just found on Channels DVR: Add Custom Channels with M3U Playlists
That should be the magic ticket to make it work with Channels. You will need to create an .m3u file with all of the desired channels. This would be as easy as going to the OpenWebif on Edision and simply copying the stream URLs into a blank file, one per line. Likewise, TVHeadend can interface with TBS tuners to produce streams, which can then be fed into Channels DVR using this method.
Yes it can, but not directly as far as I can see. You need TV headend or similar to trans code it. Channels is great for OTA, just wish they added sat tuners without using 3rd party software. It can read a TS stream from a Silicone dust, it should be able to read it from a sat card also, but not have to make m3u files. I wish they would add to the source files.
They already added support for satip URLS late in 2020 - see: Sat>IP support
(tmm1 is one of the main developers of Channels DVR).
I'd like to see Silicon Dust produce a multi-standard DVB-T/S/S2 HDHomeRun, but Since they're a relatively small U.S. company, and FTA is a small market in the U.S., it's probably not on their radar. The next best alternative would be an SAT>IP server, but those seem to be an even smaller market, plus the majority of models seem to be out of stock everywhere I look (including UK and Germany).
I'm currently playing around with a VBox XTi 4134 (VBox Android TV Gateway for Satellite | VBox Communications), which is essentially an Android TV-based DVB-S2 receiver that has SAT>IP capabilities, like generating an M3U that Channels DVR can use directly. They have an admin web interface for much of the satellite configuration stuff.
Since it's Android, I can run Channels DVR on the box itself. Since Channels DVR has a web interface too, the day-to-day configuration I care about can all be done remotely.
Their latest Android TV release (v8) currently has a problem writing to external USB drives, which prevents it being used as a DVR
I'm working through that with them, hopefully should be resolved soon. Android TV is certainly capable of doing what I want, I've done some experiments with an nVidia Shield running Channels DVR to test it out.
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ChannelsDVR should be able to stream directly from the Edision os mio without any transcoding or 3rd party software required. The enigma2 web interface provides TS streams just like HDHomeRun. You can find the TS stream for each channel in the m3u file or in the VLC stream properties.
The Channels howto provides step-by-step directions on building an m3u file. This is necessary because Channels needs to know what sat channels to map to what channel numbers. It's really easy - you can do it in less time than it will take you to complain about it, I promise
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