Best Freesat Box and DVB-S2 USB for SageTV 7 Setup in UK

[emotionnotion]

Gents,

now that I have sold my soul to SageTV 7 (2 HD300s on pre-order), I have decided to defect from Sky HD and complement my HD Homerun OTA Freeview tuners with a Freesat HD setup.

Not sure what to do here; I understand some of the newer Freesat boxes can save to a NAS/Shared Drive (in which case I could import using metadata tools).

I also had bad experiences controlling Satellite boxes in the past with Windows Media Centre.

My questions:

1) What is the best Freesat HD box out there for usage with SageTV
2) Can you get Freesat with a CI Slot (for pay-per-view) and does this work with SageTV
3) If needed, what is the best USB DVB-S2 tuner (for use with WHS) and how does it control the Freesat box?
4) Do I need DVB-S2 for HD?
5) How difficult is it to maintain/synchronise the EPG/Frequencies (I use Digiguide, Stephanes importer and XMLTV seamlessly with the HDHomerun tuners at present)?

Cheers

[brewston]

I think you have 3 options :

o Get a set top box and then attach a tuner to its outputs (eg if it outputs SCART then you could attach an analogue tuner) Not sure if you can get a HD signal out though (That might be what HDPVR is about - I'm a bit sketchy on that) This will require an IR blaster to tell Sage to change the channel on the STB. I used to have this with my old Sky box and found it a bit of a faff but lots of people use IR blasters. The upside is that whatever your Sky card lets you view can be recorded (Except maybe HD, see previous comment)

o Get a DVB-S[2] tuner with a card reader (CAM & CI) to allow you to get subscribed channels. Again, I've seen mentions of this on the forums but have never really investigated myself as I don't like paying Sky anything :-)

o Get a DVB-S[2] tuner without a card reader. This is what I have - thee Hauppauge one. I thought I needed DVB-S2 for HD but apparently not. I also use Digiguide and Stephane's importer. I just created two lineups in the importer (freesat & freeview) as long as the call signs for the channels match, then the EPG will merge them. I set my DVB-S2 card as a higher priority tuner, simply because my satellite signal is faultless and the DVB-T wavers sometimes...

Hope that helps. I'm sure someone will correct anything I got wrong

[emotionnotion]

Hey Brewston; thanks for that.

Option 1 is the configuration I had with Windows Media Centre which was tempramental at best (program changes did not always work and left you on a different or non-existent channel) so hoping to avoid that altogether (IR's etc)

So it's options 2 or 3 (more integrated and more controllable); I understand you lose the ability to watch all premium channels (99% of what we watch is on freeview anyway except football which I never watch recorded anyhow).

The CI option is interesting as this may enable us to get some premium channels onto the Sage ecosystem but not sure how reliable/tempramental they are.

Now I know about matching the callsigns that makes things easier.

The only issue I see is I am running on Windows Home Server and this would need to be USB-based not an internal card hence the request for options in this space that are reliable.

Cheers

[brewston]

Since I can only get 1 PCI card in my server, I've thought about getting this one :

http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/site/prod...novasusb2.html

But I'd have to get a dual LNB on my dish and run a new cable

There are not many reports of people using that tuner on the forums but I've found hauppauge to be mostly OK (once you get over the finicky drivers)

[MCE-Refugee]

You should definitely get DVB-S tuners rather than using the output of a Freesat box. You will not have the MCE problems of having to control it with IR bugs & even more importantly will have much better picture quality with HD & 5.1 surround on the HD channels.

You could set up tuners in another Windows PC as 'network encoders' using another of Stephane's superb Sage add-ons. Then over your LAN the TV transport stream is served to the Sage Server.

If you do use a USB tuner on your WHS system then be sure to use a mainstream brand that is supported like the Hauppauge WinTV Nova-S-USB2. I have no experience of any external DVB-S2 devices other than the firewire connected Floppy/FireDTV-S2 but unfortunately these are no longer made as Digital Everywhere went out of business. I found this one which is cheap & should theoretically work with Sage http://www.dvbshop.net/product_info....264-USALS.html

The issue with DVB-S vs. DVB-S2 tuners is that at present all the Free To View HD channels use DVB-S & there is a possibility that they will shift to DVB-S2 at some future date. All standard definition channels will remain as DVB-S forever (or at least until Sky & Freesat replace all their existing SD boxes).

[paulie]

I use a "Technotrend S2 3600" usb tuner for freesat and find it excellent with sage. There is Technotrend a CI option available also. I tried a Hauppauge Nova S2 usb but it was troublesome.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?ie=UTF8&k...sl_qp5963iqa_e