Re: [LUG] OTT PCI DVB-T freeview card

On 5 Jul 2015 12:46 pm, "Simon Avery" <digdilem@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 4 July 2015 at 19:44, bad apple <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Damn it, more MythTV! DKMS'ing modules is like clockwork for me, but I
can't drop something on my end users that requires manual intervention
like that... This is exactly why MythTV is effectively unusable for
anyone except hackers or Linux sysadmins. "End users" in this case is
elderly family members that decidedly don't want complicated crap like
that to deal with, and I can't SSH into their box every day just to make
sure something isn't broken. Again.

Mythtv is not simple software to set up. Never has been, likely never will be.

I've found their devs to be /extremely/ closed-minded, more so than any other project I've worked with. When I asked how to rename the files to be human friendly, the response was "Don't rename them, or you won't be able to play back". When I explained that I didn't want to play back through the myth interface, rather playing the mpgs directly from the FS, I actually got abuse back.Â

So I looked at the mysql database, wrote some perl, and my script has been happily doing just that for half a decade.Â

Anyway, despite that it's good software without equal. But it's not for end users. It's for geeks who are enjoy spending time faffing around getting it working.

My freesat solution is:

A 120cm dish that I bought very cheaply to mess around with foreign TV reception. When I grew bored of that, it stayed in a shed until digital switchover made DVB-T / Freeview completely unusable. Seriously, Freeview worked fine before DSO, then after no matter how much faffing, alignment and new aerials, remained stubbornly crap.Â

So I dug the dish out of the shed, bought a quad LNB off ebay for a few quid. Two lines from that go to my server in the loft and record anything on freesat that I want (or myth identifies from keywords).Â

Two more [1] lines from that quad go into the living room and into the back of a Humax freesat box with a 500gb hdd. It's a beautifully designed and very reliable unit with a nice interface. My wife can drive it better than I can. Full smooth seek, rewind, live pause, scheduling - all the stuff that Sky+ gives at a price, this thing does for freesat. It's very nice and would be the unit I recommend to your relatives as a "Install and forget" freesat solution.

[1] - So you can watch one thing and record another. Or record two things.

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