minisatip + Freeview

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PANiCnz

990 posts

Ultimate Geek

#248083 9-Mar-2019 18:55

I recently purchased a Telestar Digibit R1 for use with Tvheadend, but for the life of me can't get it to tune free air channels over DVB-S. Has anyone got any experience using minisatip with DVB-S/DVB-S2 broadcasts here in NZ?

My particular configuration is the R1 with the satip-axe firmware. All four tuners are detected by Tvheadend, but it fails to successfully scan the Freeview muxes and does not detect any channels. There appears to be a specific setting required for the 10750mhz LNB, but this alone isn't proving enough to get channels to tune.

I've been able to tune channels using the stock firmware, but there are a number of features I need in the community firmware that the stock doesn't have.

RunningMan

8954 posts

Uber Geek

#2194718 9-Mar-2019 19:21

What settings does it require for the LNB? Sometimes need to fudge them a bit if it's looking for a universal LNB.

PANiCnz

990 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2194726 9-Mar-2019 19:36

RunningMan:

What settings does it require for the LNB? Sometimes need to fudge them a bit if it's looking for a universal LNB.

That's half my problem, the documentation is light and accordingly I'm not sure what settings are mandatory/necessary. There's enough commentary on the internet to suggest the out of the box configuration works for a lot of users (likely in Europe).

The config is stored in /etc/sysconfig/config, and there is a line "MINISATIP8_OPTS=""" where parameters can be set, such as "-L *:10750-10750-10750" to specify the LNB parameters.

My assumption is that there are additional parameters that need to be set, over and above what I've already identified, I just don't know what they are.

fe31nz

1229 posts

Uber Geek

#2194850 10-Mar-2019 01:06

Here is my working minisatip command line:

-f -i 1 -a 7:2:0 -e 6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 -L *:10750-10750-99999 -o 127.0.0.1:9000 -g -p /playlist.m3u -l http -R /root/projects/minisatip/minisatip/html/

Note that I am using an old version of minisatip (0.7.4) due to a fatal bug that I ran across in later versions. That bug may now be fixed in even later versions, but as my setup is working fine, I have not looked.

The "-f" option is to run minisatip in the foreground without forking. That is how daemons should be run when using systemd. The "-i 1" is to run minisatip at high priority. Without that when my MythTV box does swapping, it is possible for minisatip to be starved of processor causing a glitch in the recordings. The "-a 7:2:0" tells minisatip that I want it to use 7 of my 8 DVB-S2 tuners and 2 of my 8 DVB-T2 tuners. The -e option tells it which of my tuners it should use. I have all my tuners locked down so they are always on the same /dev/dvb/adapter<n> device when I reboot. The first 7 numbers in the -e list are the 7 DVB-S2 tuners the -a option told it to use. The last 2 numbers in -e are the 2 DVB-T2 tuners. The "-L *:10750-10750-99999" tells it to set the both local oscillator low and high frequencies to 10750 MHz, with the 99999 telling it to only switch to the high frequency when tuning to some frequency > 99999 MHz. So it should never switch to the high frequency, which is important as the Sky LNBs do not have a high frequency local oscillator, so if you ever send the tone signal to the LNB to tell it to switch to its high local oscillator, it will switch to that non-existent high oscillator and you will get no signal from the dish. The "-o 127.0.0.1:9000" option tells it where to connect to Oscam. The "-g" option tells it to log to syslog. The "-p" option tells it where to find the playlist.m3u file that it will provide when asked. That location is relative to the path for the html directory specified in the "-R" option.

Here are the settings in my /etc/modprobe.d/options-dvb.conf file that lock down my tuners. The HTML formatting of this forum is screwing up the column alignment of the = DVB-S2=" and "=DVB-T2=" labels and I can not see any way to fix that. The tuners from 7 to 14 are DVB-S2 and from 0 onwards they are DVB-T2.

# TBS6909 8 tuner DVB-S2 card and TBS6209 8 tuner DVB-T2 card (they use the same tbsecp3 driver).
options mxl58x mode=1 inputs=1,1,1,1
#options mxl58x mode=0
# TBS6909 TBS6209
# ====== DVB-S2 ====== ===== DVB-T2 =====
options tbsecp3 adapter_nr=7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,0,1,2,3,16,15,4,17
# Adapter 0-4 = DVB-T2 MythTV
# Adapter 5-6 = currently unused (was sasc-ng virtual tuners)
# Adapter 7 = DVB-S2 EPG and channel scanning (via scripts)
# Adapter 8-14 = DVB-S2 minisatip or TVHeadend
# Adapter 15-16 = DVB-T2 minisatip or TVHeadend
# Adapter 17 = DVB-T2 EPG and channel scanning (via scripts)
# Note: The physical adapters 4 and 16 are swapped as 4 seems to be faulty - it gets a lot of pixelation on the Maori multiplex.

Note that I am using my own custom patched version of the TBS drivers for my TBS6909 and TBS6209 tuner cards, which provides the "inputs=1,1,1,1" option that allows me to tell the TBS6909 card to make all 4 of its tuner pairs take their aerial input from the input 1 F-connector (which is connected to my Sky dish).

PANiCnz

990 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2195002 10-Mar-2019 11:57

Quick update, tried the following config and have successfully scanned channels with TVH "-e 0-4 -L *:10750-10750-99999". Will add a few extra tweaks in due course but for now its nice to have channels tune.

sub

358 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2195965 11-Mar-2019 15:57

PANiCnz:

I recently purchased a Telestar Digibit R1 for use with Tvheadend, but for the life of me can't get it to tune free air channels over DVB-S. Has anyone got any experience using minisatip with DVB-S/DVB-S2 broadcasts here in NZ?

I've got a Telestar Digibit R1, and have successfully used it with Freeview in NZ. I used it with NextPVR. It's been a while since I used it, but don't remember having to do anything special, and got it working without too much effort. At times I it with both a Unicable LNB, and a regular Sky LNB.

PANiCnz

990 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2196020 11-Mar-2019 18:09

I've got it working now, really impressed. The ability to use all four tuners off one input is really nice, and its much quicker at channel zapping than any PCIe or USB tuners I've used before. It could have been a case of fat fingers but changing " -L *:10750-10750-10750" to " -L *:10750-10750-99999" seems to have made all the difference. Now I know what I'm doing I'd agree its a very straight forward setup.

I've got an existing TVH setup in place with a USB DVB-S2 tuner, so once I was able to scan channels it was all very straight forward and well within my comfort zone.