Any experience of the DVB-S/S2 vbox 3332?

Forums › Freeview (DVB-T/DVB-S) › Any experience of the DVB-S/S2 vbox 3332?

dmshimself

43 posts

Geek

#248426 26-Mar-2019 03:51

I run mythtv with freeview DVB-T tuners and I'm moving north where there is only satellite reception. There is an existing sky dish at our new home and I don't really want to stop using mythtv, but I'm having trouble finding any DV-S/S2 tuners that can be bought here. My mind turned to the VBOX 3332 which supports DVB-S/S2 and I wondered if anyone had experience of using this in NZ?

But in addition, if anyone else is using mythv with satellite in NZ, I'd be interested in knowing what devices they used to hook up to the dish.

fe31nz

1229 posts

Uber Geek

#2205440 27-Mar-2019 02:02

I use MythTV with DVB-T and DVB-S2. The DVB-T tuners are used for Freeview HD, and DVB-S2 for recording Sky via my Sky card. I found my USB tuners were OK, but I had to work at keeping them reliable, due to cable and socket problems. My PCI and PCIe tuners were very reliable. So when I was looking for more tuners, I looked at network and PCIe tuners. Network tuners came with their own problems of reliability, and not all of them support MythTV for scanning for channels or multirec, so I chose to go with PCIe tuners, but get them all on one card. If you do go with network tuners, it is best to have them on their own Ethernet port and you have to do special systemd configuration to make sure that mythbackend does not get started before networking is fully up are up and the tuners are able to be connected to. Network tuners also add a bit more to your electricity bill than PCIe ones, and need more sockets on your plugstrip.

I started with upgrading my DVB-S2 tuners - I had one USB and one PCIe one, and I replaced those with a TBS6908 8 tuner card PCIe card. That went well, so when Maori TV got their own frequencies and we then had five DVB-T muxes to record from, I got a TBS6209 8 tuner DVB-T2 PCIe card. Both cards work with all 8 tuners connected to one aerial input. And they are both working well. But the downside of TBS tuners (apart from the expense of 8 tuner cards) is that you have to compile their drivers each time the kernel gets upgraded, and sometimes they are not quick enough in tracking kernel changes and it fails to compile for a while and you have to keep using an older kernel. The TBS6209 card also does have a small fan, and fans like that are not good for longevity. When they fail, the card normally dies immediately by overheating, and they always do fail eventually.

I bought both of my TBS 8 tuner cards from Ebay - either TBS or someone associated with them had (still has?) an Ebay shop that sells at sale prices once or twice a year, and the sale prices were just low enough for me to buy them at a price that allowed them to arrive here just under the GST limit, shipping included. Sometimes TBS cards turn up on TradeMe, but I do not know of any official sellers in NZ.

The TBS6909 card is just being superceeded by the TBS6909-X card, which does the latest DVB-S2X standard, but is even more expensive. But the TBS6909 is still available.

You can buy the TBS PCIe cards at the official prices here:

https://www.tbsiptv.com/categories?path=0_167&limit=100

If you want help with the drivers for these cards, PM me. I have a script to download, patch and install them. The patch I use allows me to tell the TBS6909 card which of its four aerial inputs to use for all 8 tuners, so I can get my stiff aerial cable to use the best input for the lowest stress.

If you only want to do Freeview on DVB-S, then you need at most three DVB-S tuners - two for the Freeview muxes on Optus D1, and one for the Sky Prime mux which broadcasts the Freeview channels that Sky provides. So you could use a 4 tuner card. However, most of the 4 tuner cards I have seen use separate aerial inputs, so you still need a splitter (or maybe an amplifier/splitter). I find not needing a splitter with my TBS6909 to be very useful.

dmshimself

43 posts

Geek

#2206429 28-Mar-2019 17:13

This is very useful indeed, many thanks. My current mythbackend cannot take PCI type cards and I'm using an HDHOMERUNNER for DVB-T That all works just fine, hence my interest in the vbox 3332 which mythtv also seems to support.

But if I'm not able to make any progres with that, I may need to revisit having a new myth box. I wanted to avoid that due to the extra costs

Thanks once again.

PANiCnz

990 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2215206 11-Apr-2019 18:45

I'm using a Telestar Digibit R1 to tune DVB-S/S2, it looks similar in specification to the VBOX 3332. I can highly recommend the R1 for ~$200 delivered off Amazon.de. Third party firmware adds a number of additional features too.

Haven't personally used it with Myth, but works flawlessly with Tvheadend.

dmshimself

43 posts

Geek

#2215508 12-Apr-2019 09:03

Many thanks I'll for sure take a look

dmshimself

43 posts

Geek

#2216503 13-Apr-2019 14:34

PANiCnz:
I'm using a Telestar Digibit R1 to tune DVB-S/S2, it looks similar in specification to the VBOX 3332. I can highly recommend the R1 for ~$200 delivered off Amazon.de. Third party firmware adds a number of additional features too.

Haven't personally used it with Myth, but works flawlessly with Tvheadend.

That looks to be a great unit but is SAT>IP which mythtv doesn’t easily support (or at all, depending on what people have tried). I’ve used tvheadend before so that might end up being the way I go, but I have so many recording rules in mythtv, I’m going to look further at that first

Thanks for the idea

fe31nz

1229 posts

Uber Geek

#2216692 13-Apr-2019 22:47

You can use SAT>IP in MythTV, but you can not scan for channels so you have to set up the URLs for the channels some other way. MythTV will load the channels from a .m3u file, if your SAT>IP setup generates one. I use SAT>IP with minisatip running my DVB-S2 tuners for Sky TV. Here is the page in the MythTV Wiki I used to figure out how to do it:

https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/SAT2IP_players_as_capture_cards

That web page is a little out of date now - you should set the multirec option (max recordings) to 2 so that MythTV will overlap recordings happening back to back using the same SAT>IP URL.

Here is the National Geographic channel from my database:

MariaDB [mythconverg]> select * from channel where sourceid=6 and channum=4072\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
chanid: 10072
channum: 4072
freqid: NULL
sourceid: 6
callsign: NATGE
name: Nat Geographic
icon: national_geographic.jpg
finetune: NULL
videofilters:
xmltvid: nat-geographic.sky.co.nz
recpriority: 0
contrast: 32768
brightness: 32768
colour: 32768
hue: 32768
tvformat: Default
visible: 1
outputfilters:
useonairguide: 0
mplexid: NULL
serviceid: 1012
tmoffset: 0
atsc_major_chan: 0
atsc_minor_chan: 0
last_record: 2019-04-12 18:29:00
default_authority:
commmethod: -1
iptvid: NULL
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

MariaDB [mythconverg]> select * from iptv_channel where chanid=10072\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
iptvid: 116
chanid: 10072
url: rtsp://satip.jsw.gen.nz:554/?src=1&freq=12581&msys=dvbs2&plts=off&fec=23&pol=h&ro=0.35&sr=22500&mtype=8psk&pids=0,1079,1007,1107,1907
type: data
bitrate: 0
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

PM me if you want details on how to make this work.