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hardware and server configuration advice

Added by Adrian Jones about 13 years ago

I have been happily using XBMC (openelec) to stream media from my ubuntu server around the house. I will soon be rebuilding the server as I have run out of disc space after ripping my DVD collection. I would like to incorporate several satellite decoder cards in the new server in order to stream tv and set up a PVR with Tvhead as a backend. So here are my questions:
1. which is the best supported DVB-S card? I am based in the UK

2. I understand that it is possible to have upto 4 decoders per dish,
a. is it possible to set up 4 DVB-S cards in one machine?
b. what impact will this have on CPU performance, etc?

Any advice on this would be great! Thanks


Replies (1)

RE: hardware and server configuration advice - Added by Hein Rigolo about 13 years ago

The best dvb-s card to buy is any DVB-S(2) card that has good support under Linux. You can have a look at the linuxtv.org wiki for supported dvb-s devices.

The number of decoders/cards per dish depends on the LNB. You can have a LNB with only one port, or with 2, 4, or even 8.
For each decoder/card that you want to connect to a LNB you need a port on the LNB. If you want to connect multiple LNB's to a single card (because you want to receive signals from multiple sats) then you need Diseqc switches.

CPU performance for 4 cards is not a problem. The only CPU intensive part of tvheadend is the decoding of encrypted channels. But with a modern CPU you can have decode multiple channels at the same time. If you start to record a lot of channels/programs at the same time then you migth hit a CPU bottle neck. But you are more likely to run into disk IO problems because you try to write a lot of data to discs (12Mbit/s for a single HD program for example)

Hein

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