Taking a plunge into the Freesat pool...

[Flatstanly]

Good morning everyone,

You have all been most kind in helping me sort out the odd issues with my SageTV configuration and for the most part I have a splendidly stable setup. Clients working happily across the house, Placeshifter performing as expected remotely.

Life is dandy. However, since freesat came along it now feels a little incomplete... One is missing HD...

So, i purchased a Hauppauge HVR4000 card and I have since been flummoxed by the setup... Frequency ranges are asked for & A or B must be slected just to set up the video source.

So, my question is this:

1. Are there step by step instructions for setting up a DVB-S video source to receive Freesat - all I found was step by step instructions to set up the EPG... (which is another concern as I get my epg over the air at present after very nearly throwing my entire sage implementation out of the window at the failure of XMLTV to work.)

2. How do other users find a DVB-S card works alongside other DVB-T cards..?

3. Will the clients need any upgrade to view HD channels..?

Any other pearls of wisdom..?

Thanks very much,

[jaminben]

1. Pretty much the same setup procedure as your DVB-T cards.
2. Mine all work fine (except HD at the moment). I dont allow the DVB-S cards to share the same channels as the DVB-T ones. So basically I use the DVB-T tuners for Freeveiw and the DVB-S cards only have channels which are not available on Freeview.
3. Can your current clients play other HD material?

Not sure about over the air epg for Freesat as I use Digiguide XMLTV which is better IMO.

[stryker]

I have 2 freeview tuners and 2 freesat. I have all the channels available on all cards so if I want to record bbc1, bbc2, itv1, itv2 all at the same time I can, however you have to set a preference for the dvb-t card(s) as obviously the dvb-s card(s) can record the HD channels thus you don't want to use them up before the dvb-t cards.... make sense?

I'll not go into a howto right now but basically in cases where multiple cards can receive the same channel IE BBC1, you bond them so in the EPG you simply see 1 bbc1 channel.

It all works very well.

Are you familiar with the xmltv package for constructing the EPGs?