You can also do more useful things like take a Freeview HD recording with 5.1 AAC audio and convert it to have an AC3 5.1 Dolby Digital track which is useful if you have a playback solution that works better with Dolby 5.1 than AAC.
Just wondering if many people use MediaPortal. I discovered it a while back and it looks very confusing to set up with a TV signal but has the benefit of recording two programmes at the same time if they're on the same multiplex. Any advice?
Just wondering if many people use MediaPortal. I discovered it a while back and it looks very confusing to set up with a TV signal but has the benefit of recording two programmes at the same time if they're on the same multiplex. Any advice?
I didn't really play with TV Portal much. I prefer TV Headend running on cheap Linux platforms. It also happily only uses one tuner to record more than one channel on the same mux. Or you can multicast entire muxes using mumudvb or dvblast (though unicast better for Wifi...)
An alternative strategy is to virtualise your tuners using MuMuDVB to multicast (or unicast) every service on each mux - so all services on PSB1, say, are streamed simultaneously, and then you can add them to many PVR back-ends as IPTV streams. This removes the concept of the tuner from the PVR back-end.
Now that DVB-T tuners are so ridiculously cheap (you can get Dual DVB-T tuners like the PS3 Play TV for around £10 on eBay) it is perfectly possible to have 3 x Dual DVB-T tuners so all 6 DVB-T muxes (PSB1 and 2, COM4,5 and6 and the Local Mux) are tuned simultaneously and all channels available simultaneously. DVB-T2 tuners are a bit more pricy, but you can often find decent USB models with Linux support for £25ish, allowing you to add 3 x DVB-T2 tuners (for PSB3, COM7 and COM8) That allows any channel to be viewed or recorded at any time with no clash, and as many Live TV clients to connect as you like (subject to network bandwidth)
Because DVB tuning is a very lightweight CPU task, you can dedicate these duties to a lightweight x86 box (I use a Celeron 2955U-based box).
I've been playing with TV Headend after noggin's recommendation - it's very capable software and wasn't too hard to setup for someone like me with limited Linux experience. The EPG design is… unconventional, but I imagine people use it together with something like Kodi/XMBC.
I've been looking to upgrade my TV tuner to take advantage of HD broadcasts over DVB-T2, mainly for archiving programmes but also for uploading clips to here/YouTube. What do people recommend when it comes to USB tuners?
The makers of my current tuner, Elgato, and their excellent and intuitive Mac software EyeTV, have sold the business off to another company Geniatech after years of not updating the software or hardware in any meaningful way, so I'm hopeful that they'll do something with that but until then I'd like to try out other options like TV Headend - especially if it lets me record multiple channels on the same mux and I can have the option of a dedicated machine for DVB.
Geniatech / August branded DVB-T2 tuners work well in Linux with modern kernels.
The new DVB-T2 EyeTV Geniatech Hybrid for €129 looks very similar to the €30 T2 stick I already have (though you get the EyeTV software for the higher price...)
Funnily (and annoyingly) enough, after I posted I visited the Geniatech EyeTV site and was surprised to see a DVB-T2 logo! It's all a bit odd as the page has been updated in broken English to say as of April it now supports it, but their official shop still has the original description that emphatically says it does not support Freeview HD. Looking at Amazon it seems the original Hybrid was quietly replaced with a new version that doesn't support analogue TV or FM radio.
Geniatech had indeed promised not only DVB-T2 products but also a new version of the EyeTV software, but I wasn't expecting it this soon.
I recently changed my USB DVB-T2 stick for a budget August model for just over £20 from Amazon. As it's a BDA device, I couldn't tell the difference in performance between that and my old PCTV stick.
I recently changed my USB DVB-T2 stick for a budget August model for just over £20 from Amazon. As it's a BDA device, I couldn't tell the difference in performance between that and my old PCTV stick.
My three year old August DVB-T2 tuner (same as a Geniatech model) is more sensitive than my original PCTV 290e.
The only thing that annoys me is that the best tuner I own is an ancient Hauppauge DVB-T Diversity stick, which allows you to merge two tuners to act as a single tuner, and switches between them based on which has the fewer errors. Feed them via two separate aerials and you get a much better signal than you would from a single tuner and aerial of the same type. Great in hotels. Sadly the Windows drivers stopper supporting diversity tuning ages ago, and the Linux drivers never have. EyeTV works brilliantly with it though. (Great for DVB-T regions, but not for T2) If you have a good signal (or are running Windows or Linux) you just get a dual tuner.
