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Well working S2 cards?

linux-dvb Mika Laitio 2 participants 4 messages May 19, 2008 Media (V4L/DVB)

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#0 lore raw

Hi

I am planning to obtain satellite dish and some PCI or PCIE satellite card for my Linux box that is running X86-64 on amd 4850e.

So far I have found the Technotrend S2-3200 and WinTV NOVA-HD-S2 that seems to be pretty equally priced. Then the HVR-4000 costs about 50 euro more but has in addition the DVB-T support.

What card you would recommend for the Linux usage and for which one the drivers are working best? (running on AMD x86-64 with 4850e cpu) And is there any differences in the tuner quality of these cards?

I assume I would with all of these cards use these multiproto/multiprotu plus versions from drivers and apps...

Mika

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#1 lore raw
Quoted 10 lines

Mika Laitio wrote:

I am planning to obtain satellite dish and some PCI or PCIE satellite card for my Linux box that is running X86-64 on amd 4850e.

So far I have found the Technotrend S2-3200 and WinTV NOVA-HD-S2 that seems to be pretty equally priced. Then the HVR-4000 costs about 50 euro more but has in addition the DVB-T support.

don't know about the hvr-4000
i have a tt s2-3200 it's cheap and works well, i don't use the CI though, so i can't tell if it's well supported by the driver (multiproto) but besides the CI part i couldn't tell you what's not properly working with this card at the moment..

you'll get some good info on linuxtv wiki :
http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-S2_PCI_Cards

But if you're going for Sat HD (1080i h264) on linux 64bit, i don't think the dvb device will be the problem as long as it has a working driver.

Quoted 4 lines

What card you would recommend for the Linux usage and for which one the drivers are working best? (running on AMD x86-64 with 4850e cpu) And is there any differences in the tuner quality of these cards?

With 1080i H264 that you'll get on DVB-T or DVB-S2 (in europe) the main problem will be to properly decode it.

If you're on 32bit you'll probably go for a dvb app with a CoreAVC patch and use that windows 32bit decoder, then your CPU hardware or the stream source, won't really matter as it's a very fast, full featured, decoder..

On 64bit, you won't be able to use CoreAVC as simply as on 32bit, it's a work in progress as far as i can tell. Then the only straight way to decode h264 is through ffmpeg (ffh264) and that decoder will probably have some troubles decoding some (most) sat streams. Problems will come either from the stream specifications, unsuported in ffh264, that will produce a jerky decoding or from the lack of CPU of your system..
Although it seems that latest ffh264 version do use multithreading on those 1080i streams, tested myself on ANIXEHD/ ASTRA PROMO HD streams, ffh264 is not a multithreaded decoder to begin with so in the worst case senario it'll use one single core of your CPU for decoding and then you can get in serious troubles..

I personnaly have now a much better experience with my little intel e2180 than i got with my previous AMD be2350, both are overclocked around 2.8-3.0GHz.

So choosing your dvb-s2 hardware/system is important regarding the DVB part but also and probably more important regarding h264 decoding, especially when using 64bit systems..

sorry it was a bit long ;)

Marc

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#2 lore raw
Quoted 7 lines

don't know about the hvr-4000
i have a tt s2-3200 it's cheap and works well, i don't use the CI though, so i can't tell if it's well supported by the driver (multiproto) but besides the CI part i couldn't tell you what's not properly working with this card at the moment..

Quoted 7 lines

you'll get some good info on linuxtv wiki :
http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-S2_PCI_Cards

But if you're going for Sat HD (1080i h264) on linux 64bit, i don't think the dvb device will be the problem as long as it has a working driver.

Yes, I also think the card with best driver support base is THE THING here. It seems that for many cards the official DVB drivers and apps are now in a little flux state
with multiple each other incompatible kernel driver and userspace app interfaces. I hope some resolution is achieved and branches are starting to find back to DVB tree.

But nice to hear that all 3 of these cards have changes to work both with S and S2.

Quoted 6 lines
Quoted 4 lines

What card you would recommend for the Linux usage and for which one the drivers are working best? (running on AMD x86-64 with 4850e cpu) And is there any differences in the tuner quality of these cards?

With 1080i H264 that you'll get on DVB-T or DVB-S2 (in europe) the main problem will be to properly decode it.

It would be interesting to find some dvb-t usb gadget for playing with it and laptop while sitting on the city cafe.

Quoted 9 lines

Problems will come either from the stream specifications, unsuported in ffh264, that will produce a jerky decoding or from the lack of CPU of your system..
Although it seems that latest ffh264 version do use multithreading on those 1080i streams, tested myself on ANIXEHD/ ASTRA PROMO HD streams, ffh264 is not a multithreaded decoder to begin with so in the worst case senario it'll use one single core of your CPU for decoding and then you can get in serious troubles..

Yeah, the 780G chipset I have has something called UVD 2.0 integrated to motherboard that should provide hardware acceleration for decoding VC-1, H.264 (AVC), WMV, and MPEG-2 sources up to 1080p resolutions. But I pet no-one has data available for getting the Linux encoding/decoding libraries to support those features.

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#3 lore raw
Quoted 4 lines

Mika Laitio wrote:
But nice to hear that all 3 of these cards have changes to work both with S and S2.

As i said i haven't had any problems with my tt s2-3200 and multiproto driver.
I believe that "budget" cards like that one are easier to support because their design is basic.

Quoted 2 lines

It would be interesting to find some dvb-t usb gadget for playing with it and laptop while sitting on the city cafe.

some usb dvb-t adapters are supported but never tested that so i can't tell for sure.
i need to get a dvb-t device myself but it'll be a pci one..

Quoted 6 lines

Yeah, the 780G chipset I have has something called UVD 2.0 integrated to motherboard that should provide hardware acceleration for decoding VC-1, H.264 (AVC), WMV, and MPEG-2 sources up to 1080p resolutions. But I pet no-one has data available for getting the Linux encoding/decoding libraries to support those features.

There's no GPU hardware acceleration currently on linux, as far as i known, besides xvmc for MPEG2 on nvidia chipsets if i'm correct.. So you'll have to rely only on your CPU for decoding h264 and that can be quite tricky with 1080i..

As Igor pointed out there's an existing project to bring coreavc support to 64 bit linux, but i couldn't get it to work so far and have no idea how stable it actually is..
Having something that "works" is very different from having something that works but will crash or freeze your app every few channel zap.. But again i'm not telling it's not working as i couldn't get it to work on my setup yet..

Good luck.

Marc

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