What's available in hardware?

[mbarnes]

What is available and what do folks recommend to get or stay away from these days in PC satellite tuners? I know there are some PCI cards out there. Anything in PCIe? How about outboard tuners that connect via USB? I am a Linux user, so I'd need something that has Linux drivers available.

I know there are lots of audio codecs available, so with a PC card, things like AC3 shouldn't be a problem, right?

Thanks.

 

[starman345]

Being Linux only, that cuts the field down. Dvbworld has just released their DVB-S2 PCIE2005, Pci-e and with a linux driver, don't know anything about it and haven't read of anyone using one yet. Dvbworld also has/had a usb-s2 box that had linux drivers but I don't see it on their site anymore.
Digital Everywhere makes the Firedtv, Floppydtv devices, I"ve seen a Linux driver on their site.
As for AC3, yes, really no problem with that on a computer.

 

[gillham]

FWIW, I use a Geniatech DVB-S DigiStar PCI card with Linux.

* No TSReader Lite support
* DVB-S only
* I haven't tried the remote input with LIRC
* PCI obviously, not PCIe
* MythTV struggles to lock some stuff that the cli tools can easily scan
* I haven't had any luck with 4:2:2 under MythTV, but mplayer works fine. I need to test this again with the latest trunk code which seems to have 4:2:2 sprinkled in a number of places.

Even though some DVB-S cards are cheap on eBay ($32.39 shipped), I don't know if that exact board is supported by v4l-dvb. My board is closer to $60 online. I think the TechnoTrend S2-3200 would be a better investment now and appears to have driver support under Linux. Search for 'stb0899' to get more information.