ideal DVB-C PCI/e card?

Hi All,

I was wondering if someone could recommend a decent DVB-C tuner card? Ideally it would be a dual DVB-C card, but I'm not sure they exist?!

I have a subscription to a PayTV provider here in Australia that uses an encryption scheme called NDS or Videoguard2.
So I'll also need the right card reader and combo of software in order to decrypt and then capture.

This stuff I can mostly work out for myself.....
But if you have any knowledge or experience in that area, then I'd be most appreciative if you can share.
As it definitely isn't for technical minnows!

Oh and in case you're worried, doing this sort of thing is not -yet- illegal in Australia.
It may be soon though, thanks to the FTA our former Prime Minister established with the U.S.

All the best,
Jed

[answering this in private since any details about softcams etc usually is unwanted on mailinglists]

Quoted 2 lines · Jed

I was wondering if someone could recommend a decent DVB-C tuner card? Ideally it would be a dual DVB-C card, but I'm not sure they exist?!

I've been looking for the same, but not been able to find one. The closest is the foilware from Netup, but it is probably going to be too expensive when/if it is available anyway.

Nor does there seem to be any DVB-C PCIe cards or USB sticks with Linux support. There are rumours about working external USB boxes. I haven't verified those, as I didn't really want any external box adding to the cable mess...

Quoted 4 lines

I have a subscription to a PayTV provider here in Australia that uses an encryption scheme called NDS or Videoguard2.
So I'll also need the right card reader and combo of software in order to decrypt and then capture.

I'm doing much of the same here, also using NDS/Videoguard2. Unless I've missed something, this excludes using any (official) hardware CAM so you don't have to worry about CI slots :-)

I am using two budget cards ("budget" is a must, as they are the cards capable of delivering a full TS to the host):

1) TerraTec Cinergy C PCI:

bjorn@canardo:~$ lspci -vvnns 5:0
05:00.0 Multimedia controller [0480]: Twinhan Technology Co. Ltd Mantis DTV PCI Bridge Controller [Ver 1.0] [1822:4e35] (rev 01)
         Subsystem: TERRATEC Electronic GmbH Device [153b:1178]
         Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
         Status: Cap- 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=medium>TAbort-<TAbort+<MAbort->SERR-<PERR- INTx-
         Latency: 64 (2000ns min, 63750ns max)
         Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 16
         Region 0: Memory at fcfff000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=4K]
         Kernel driver in use: Mantis
         Kernel modules: mantis

2) Mystique CaBiX-C2 (available from www.dvbshop.net):

bjorn@canardo:~$ lspci -vvnns 5:1
05:01.0 Multimedia controller [0480]: Philips Semiconductors SAA7146 [1131:7146] (rev 01)
         Subsystem: KNC One Device [1894:0022]
         Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
         Status: Cap- 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium>TAbort-<TAbort-<MAbort->SERR-<PERR- INTx-
         Latency: 64 (3750ns min, 9500ns max)
         Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 17
         Region 0: Memory at feaffc00 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512]
         Kernel driver in use: budget_av
         Kernel modules: budget-av

The TerraTec card is working very well, but requires the mantis driver which entered linux in 2.6.33. This means that there are few distributions providing it at the moment, as most of them are going for 2.6.32.

The Mystique card also does it's job, but I have had a few problems with the driver when some other part of the system is failing (in my case, a SATA disk). The driver seems to be very fragile wrt timeouts, and is far too eager to fill the log with identical useless messages. I'm planning to fix this as soon as I get around to it, but...

If I were to buy the cards a second time, then I think I would buy two Terratec cards.

For smartcard reader I am using a simple and cheap reader from OmniKey:

bjorn@canardo:~$ lsusb -s 5:2
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 076b:3021 OmniKey AG CardMan 3121

I've also tested with another CCID USB reader, SCM SCR331, which also worked just fine. What you want to look for is a reader supported by libccid ("apt-cache show libccid" in Debian/Ubuntu will show you the list). You may also want to check out which voltages the readers support. Modern cards tend to lower their Vcc all the time, and there are a few stories of burnt cards (I assume that's because of running a 3.3 V card in a reader only capable of providing 5 V).

Quoted 7 lines

This stuff I can mostly work out for myself.....
But if you have any knowledge or experience in that area, then I'd be most appreciative if you can share.
As it definitely isn't for technical minnows!

Oh and in case you're worried, doing this sort of thing is not -yet- illegal in Australia.

That's the situation here in Norway as well, provided that you actually
pay for the subscription. At least that's my interpretation of the
legal status :-)

When I started this project, I briefly tried sasc-ng. I did work OK but I disliked the need to use the dvbloopback module. Mostly a principle wrt out-of-tree drivers. But I would probably have continued to use it if I hadn't discovered that VDR provided everything I needed (I initially rejected it because I got the wrong impression that it couldn't run on a headless box, which is what I do). The VDR softcam plugin eliminates the need for any in-kernel hacks. It's all just userspace.

So now I am happily using VDR with vdr-sc. I could not make the videoguard2 smartcard driver for vdr-sc working (didn't try hard - probably only a minor configuration problem on my side), but am instead using vdr-sc as a cardclient against oscam. I've built oscam with PCSC support so that all card communication goes through pcscd.

This setup works for me, but I'm still not 100% sure that card updates are working. There is something weird with the interface between vdr-sc and oscam. So there are certainly some bugs to sort out, both in vdr-sc and in oscam. But one of my main reasons for choosing these over other options is the open source. This does make it possible to fix bugs and contribute. And both packages do have active developers who respond to the reports and suggestions they get.

The list of mostly working features:
- decrypting multiple channels simultaneously. Of course limited to the two frequecies which I can tune, but there doesn't seem to be any other limit on the number of channels I can use
- both HD and SD decryption (also when using a subscription card from a SD only STB!)
- automatic configuration of the smartcard/STB mating. This is currently a bit flakey but work is on the way to improve it. You can always work around it by configuring "BoxID" manually, so it's not a big problem anyway

Hope this helps. Looking forward to hearing how things go. The more
open source Videoguard2 users we get, the better :-)

Bjørn

Excellent response, & thank-you for so much detail!
I apologise for my anaemic response, but it is very late here now, that's my excuse anyway! ;)

Just curious, why did you pick VDR over MythTV? I would rather use the later + OSCam (maybe) if feasible.

Thanks again for the excellent feedback, it's heartening to know there's other videoguard2 users out there!

Good-night.

Quoted 18 lines · Bjørn Mork

[answering this in private since any details about softcams etc usually is unwanted on mailinglists]

Quoted 2 lines · Jed

I was wondering if someone could recommend a decent DVB-C tuner card? Ideally it would be a dual DVB-C card, but I'm not sure they exist?!

I've been looking for the same, but not been able to find one.  The closest is the foilware from Netup, but it is probably going to be too expensive when/if it is available anyway.

Nor does there seem to be any DVB-C PCIe cards or USB sticks with Linux support.  There are rumours about working external USB boxes.  I haven't verified those, as I didn't really want any external box adding to the cable mess...

There are a few DVB-C/T/(analogTV) USB devices, our USB Sticks are well supported and tested with Linux.

Just curious, why did you pick VDR over MythTV? I would rather use the later + OSCam (maybe) if feasible.