Advice for watching UK Satellite TV

[kobekatt]

Hello SageTV users!

I am desperately in need of some help and your advice.

I have recently moved from Australia to Sweden and aside from the weather, I am starting to experience some definite English speaking TV withdrawal.

I have experimented with some Internet TV services and so forth (sling box) but my ideal solution would be to watch UK Satellite TV.

The good news is that I am living way in the South West of Sweden (Malmo) and I have found a company that specializes in installing satellite dishes to receive UK Satellite TV.

The 2 choices they have told me are Freesat (requires a 180-200cm dish to receive in Sweden) and Sky (requires a 90cm dish). They have told me that Freesat is pretty straight forward and they can supply the box to watch on my TV. For Sky, I need a UK billing address and need to buy the Sky box plus card (I have a UK billing address so no problem there).

I have used SageTV for a number of years but have never used any type of satellite setup. Ideally, I would GREATLY prefer to watch UK TV through SageTV and NOT through a regular box connected to my TV. I just couldnt go back to the very bad PVR/DVRs the companies supply.

So, on to my questions:

1) Which of the 2 options do you recommend (Freesat v Sky)?

I am mostly looking for BBC and the sporting channels. I definitely want to be able to watch the Ashes cricket later this year and Formula 1 on BBC. Thinking ahead, I want to ensure that I can get ESPN (UK) which shows Australian Football, for next year.

2) Which is easier to setup and maintain?

3) What type of card would I need?

4) Ideally, I would like to receive all my sports channels in HD. Does this make things more difficult or no real difference?

I currently have a pretty high end Sagetv server, running the latest SageTV 7 beta with Windows 7 and I am very happy with it. I have plenty of storage (3TBs) and plenty of space for cards, etc.

Lastly, if anyone that is very experienced would be willing to be hired as a "consultant" to help me get this all up and running, I would love to hire someone. I really dont have a lot of spare time to devote to this, I just want my sport channels up and running!

Thanks and sorry for the somewhat long post.

[brewston]

Hi

I can comment on Freesat as that's what I have. The deciding factor for you would be wether the freesat channels show the sports stuff you're interested in - here's the channel line up :

http://www.radioandtelly.co.uk/freesatchannels.html

If opt for this, connect the cable from the dish directly into the DVB-S tuner (I have a Nova HD from Hauppauge) Tell Sage which satellite you're using and scan away...

If you decide you have to have Sky - you have 2 options :

o Take an analogue signal out of the Sky box and into an analogue tuner, you will need an IR blaster to change the channels. I used to have to this, I found IR blasting to be flakey and the picture quality pretty poor.

o use a CAM/CI card reader with a DVB-S tuner that supports it, this allows you to use to you Sky card to decrypt the non-FTA channels. But this is the bit I'm most sketchy on, so I will let others chip in...

Cheers

[kobekatt]

Originally Posted by brewston

Hi

I can comment on Freesat as that's what I have. T

Thanks brewston, that actually helps quite a bit. It really does sound very easy to use Freesat, but looking at the line up, I dont think it's going to have the sports channels that I want =(

Ideally, if I choose to go with Sky, I dont want to mess around with the IR blasters and so forth. I would likely choose the CAM option but would have to lean a lot more about it.

I hope some people with Sky can give some further advice.

[Mark SS]

Sage aside, I'd be querying why you'd need a larger dish for Freesat than Sky. They are after all transmitted from the same satellite in the same frequency bands.

To your questions:

1) Which of the 2 options do you recommend (Freesat v Sky)?

Thats entirely down to what channels you require. If you're after sports, you'll be heading for Sky.

2) Which is easier to setup and maintain?

AFAIK, Freesat is free-to-air so you wouldn't need an access card to decrypt. It's the decryption which is a PITA, so Freesat would be the easy route.

3) What type of card would I need?

Do you mean what PCI/PCIE card to plug into the PC? Any DVB-S2 card if you're going to go with a SoftCam, a card which has a CAM slot if going the hardware CAM route (explained below).

4) Ideally, I would like to receive all my sports channels in HD. Does this make things more difficult or no real difference?

Doesn't make any difference with complexity of setup.

Regarding CAMs (conditional access module); if you're intending to go with Sky you need a software (SoftCAM) or hardware (CAM) which will decrypt channels in combination with your subscriber card.

I wasn't aware of any hardware solutions for Sky since the last time they changed the sub cards but someone mentioned recently that there is a solution available but I don't remember what it was.

I and several others have gone the SoftCAM route, using DVBE4Sage (http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36814) with NDSCam (an MDAPI plugin, google details on both) with a serial card reader to interface with the Sky card. There is also the recently released http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49610 which could also be used with NDSCam, although I don't know if anyone has succeeded in getting it running yet.

There is a thread running on AVForums which will help with the background on hardware and software cams: http://www.avforums.com/forums/windo...-part-3-a.html.

[rhinoman]

My old man uses a satellite box in Spain and they have the same size dish for receiving Sky or Freesat because he has one of each from the same dish.

[MCE-Refugee]

Originally Posted by Mark SS

Sage aside, I'd be querying why you'd need a larger dish for Freesat than Sky. They are after all transmitted from the same satellite in the same frequency bands.

No they are not using the same satellites for all channels. The various channels are transmitted from a group of satellites which although all co-located at approx 28.2E have different footprints. All of the major FTA transmissions (BBC,ITV,C4, five etc) use Astra 2D as this is supposedly tightly targeted on the UK & thus there are no rights issues about broadcasting to the whole of Europe. The Sky channels as they are encrypted can use Astra 2A, Astra 2B & Eurbird 1have a much larger footprint as theoretically only subscribers in the UK can access the service.