minisatip + Freeview

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

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