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Re: [LUG] DVB-S via old Sky Disk [Linux + tvheadend]

 

Hi Mr M

I've run two tuners on Freesat since it started, and Freeview before that (Unfortunately, the digital switchover completely destroyed freeview signal in my area, so freesat was the only non-commercial option!) ÂLuckily I had an old 80cm dish knocking around from earlier geeky fiddles to get european TV and improve my German (which works fine, but I got bored once it was working and never did learn the language)

Drivers are a pain for my card, needing a manual rebuild for each kernel, and the software is mythtv and mythweb. The latter for everything but configuring so it's a remote server.

Myth is of the old school - somewhat unfriendly devs, cliquey support, arcane setups and not user friendly to configure. But it's the best I've found which records as straight MPGs (and I use a script to rename them to human-readable, since I playback from the filesystem, rather than by myth itself)

The best guide I've found for freesat and myth is here, which has the required frequencies; http://parker1.co.uk/mythtv_freesat.php

There are windows alternatives too, of course - some quite good, if you can avoid the not-good and adware-riddled ones, or pay a lot. I've not kept pace with those so can't say what's good.

On 10 April 2017 at 00:50, Steven CÃtà via list <list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>Does anyone know for sure if an old Sky dish (as in, Sky ceased
>provisioning the paid service X years ago but left all the kit in place)
>can provide a working output that can be fed into a Linux machine?

I've run a MythTV box off an old Sky installation for years. So yeah, it definitely should work without modification. Basically, Freesat is just the branding for a tuner that pulls in all the unencrypted channels on the Sky satellites and bundles them up with a digital tv guide (that's not strictly true, but it's close enough for this conversation).

If you have a scan running and it's reporting back anything positive, then the frequencies it's reporting should work. Having said that, even if you specifically only ask for unencrypted tv channels, some cruft usually gets through, so restrict testing to channels that you know exist.

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