If he's already got Sky+ then you're preaching to the converted. I'm enjoying my own portable PVR now using BBC iPlayer on iPod touch.

The one thing the myth box at work will have to concede to a sky+ will be the encrypted channels like Sky Sports. Although I am looking at Dragon CAMs an the like.

Perhaps -- but even the Blu-ray bandwidth is only 54Mbits/s, so a normal Gbit switch would theoretically do the job so long as nobody else is saturating the Gbit link from the switch to the media server.

Peter

Modern versions of MythTV can do this for DVB-T/S/S2, at least for unencrypted channels. The only restriction is that you need as many tuners in the server as there are different multiplexes (not channels) being watched. Even that thing I lashed up can do it for DVB-T radio, though I never bothered trying to get video to work. It's all in UPnP AV v2.

[Edit on rereading your post] It doesn't "decode" them as such, of course; it distributes the raw, encoded MPEG2 stream around the house. But that's what you actually want.

Peter

/me wonders why he said that....
Ah, I think I was mainly answering Archeon and his subscription/TV...



I've been thinking about a Dragon CAM for *ages* too.

But no conceding here.... I record using PVR350 s-video capture so I already get encrypted Sky channels from the normal sky box. The problem is that the SD picture quality is *so* good - even on my 120" projector - that I can't really be bothered with the CAM

To be fair, I do get occasional artefacts - Strictly Come Dancing has so much fast movement, glitterballs and the rest that the picture changes radically every frame... makes capture/compression quite hard (even for the broadcasters).

In general though I can't fault it.

That's a true shame. I'm guessing everybody who switched to digital TV has this problem, 'cause about everybody has more than one TV set in the house these days. The company that can come up with a simple solution to this that truly works will make some serious money me thinks. All that would be necessary is a centralised set-top box (in which then all the necessary CAM modules/Smart cards should be plugged) with multiple HDMI outs which could be each send out a separate video stream. You should then use UTP or something for the remote control return path.

Hmmm... here's hoping!

Thanks for that Tony, that explains a lot!

Unfortunately, we don't have such a thing like Sky+ or Tivo over here. . But my channel provider (Telenet) provides a similar service. That's why I would like to be able to use the Telenet CAM card in a different CAM module, but unfortunately they don't allow that. They made it like so that you have to use their own (inferior) hardware. I'm really hoping that the market will force them to release that obligation at one time or another, but I'm not holding my breath since (on cable) they don't have any competition here... (which is exactly the reason why I'm expecting more from satellite)

Eh? They've made a CAM but it only works in their specific set top box? Thats a bit strange...

From what I can tell, Telenet just use Nagravision and you can buy non specific CAMs for that.

I know it's strange, but it's like that. You receive their card, and you need to use it in their own set-top-box (which you need to buy or rent). Even more, you cannot even swap your card into the decoder of eg. your neighbour which uses the exact same set-top-box (because, as said, telenet's the only cable provider in Belgium), that also doesn't work. They do this like so because you can subscribe to more digital channels. If the card would be swappable between set-top-boxes, you could 'rent' your card to your neighbour if you wanted to. That's their explanation at least, which I find total BS BTW.

Pairing the CAM and the box is fairly common. It just stops you from moving it around all the time. You should still be able to pair it with your own receiver card or box.

I've never tried it myself, but from what I've heard, it cannot be done. Telenet will refuse to mate your CAM with a different box than one of their own. It's just another level of 'protection' (read:income) I guess...

Specifically, the center wire in RG6 is substantially thicker than that in RG59, and the shielding is also usually better.

Cheers

I wouldn't say they were 'exactly' the same. I find the sat cable is usually more sturdy with a better jacket, usually at least double screened with a solid dilectric and much better RF performance. I've used sat cable all over the house.

If you use a multiswitch then the current carrying capability of the indoor cabling is less important as the voltage and tone is there purely to tell the multiswitch what you want instead of powering the LNB as that's what the multiswitch does.

I'd assumed you were referring to tahir since you addressed him at the start of your two posts.



Hmm, it's the whole decoding and recoding thing that makes the broadcast engineer in me recoil in horror.

Out of interest, where do you get your EPG data from? From what I understand, when presented with DVB-S MythTV grabs it's EIT data from the FreeSat EPG. Even if you have a DVB-S card in your backend, how do you get data specific to the Sky premium channels as I understand the Sky EPG data is encrypted.

I know <shudder>.
The PVR350 does a surprisingly good job though.You can encode at a fairly high bitrate (8<mumble-but-m-or-M>b[p]s) though.

[edit, actually it's worse - it goes from the sky box RGB output (and it is RGB) to a decent VCR (yes, a VCR) that has an s-video output - and that is what is recoded]

We may have a big^H^H^Hhuge screen - but it doesn't hurt that we sit a fair way back!


Radio Times has everything we need (and I was the one who wrote the original +1 offset code for the XMLTV rt_grabber to get fake +1 channels when RT don't publish them)

I don't know about film/sport channels though, we just want SciFi and Sky One

Wow lots of responses. I've never used fibre, what's the benefit? Is there any real benefit in cat6, 7 or 8 for my purposes?

And yes, the idea is to have only a screen in every room, we'll have a fairly large plant room for the MVHR (mechanical ventilation and heat recovery) system and the thermal heat store (big super insulated water cylinder)

It's a fairly large 5 bedroom house, mostly ground floor. These are fairly accurate plans (some changes have been made since)

Part of me says that, the rest of me says I really don't additional bits of kit in each room.

Very relevant for me. Where are you building, what kind of house?

Excellent. Ours si virtually a bungalow, there'll be 20mm between wall and plasterboard on all external walls, and a 100 mm ceiling void, we're all flat (grass) rooves son no loft space.

You've lost me with all your nodetalk

Same here, we had Sky+ as soon as it came out

It's home-automation-speak. "Node0" simply means "the cupboard with all the ugly kit and lots of wires coming out". ie it should be hidden but accessible.

And attached is a schematic of our hifi around the house.

All done through a single cat5 to each point. (I put in spare where I could)

Ta, gives me an idea or two.

I wish TiVo hadn't pulled out of the UK market. I bought one years ago and still use it albeit with some upgrades. It is only a S1 unit but I think the UI is vastly better than Sky+. Shame that its only single tuner and has to reencode everything.

Building near Bruges, Belgium. The house is a typical two storey building with a piramid shaped roof. This means straight walls on both levels, and as much room upstairs as there is downstairs. There's also a 7x7m attic, but that's entirely under the roof. (that 7x7 meter attic is the 'usuable room', meaning the room where an adult can stand without bumping his/her head. There also a bit more room beyond those 7x7 meters, since the entire roof is 13 x 13 meter. That 3 meter of 'crawlspace' around the usuable space is very handy to tuck wires in and to reach the level below through the ceiling with the obiligatory ventilation system. I'd have to look if I could find a decent .pdf file to put up here.

The house is entirely built from the ground up with energy saving in mind. In the ground plate there will be 15 cm of isolation (apart from the concrete ground plate which will be 20 cm thick) so the cold cannot get through the ground floor. In the walls there will be 10 cm of high-isolation plates. Below the room there will be 18 cm of isolating fabric. The house will be heated with a heatpump and ventilated with a mechanical ventilation pump with heat recovery fed with air that goes through a 'Canadian pitt' (don't know the term in English, but in essence this means that the air which is pulled into the house is guided through a 30 meter long 20 cm wide tube that is put under the ground 2 meter deep - the air that goes through this tube is thus pre-heated to the temparture of the ground, winter and summer 10°C-12°C - this has the advantage that in the winter you never draw in frozen air and thus can't kill your ventilation pump, and in summer this air can cool the house)

Also, the entire house will be run via home automation software. I've got the whole thing down, the only thing that is still bugging me is the aforementioned (digital) TV system. I also believe there is nothing cooler than seeing a nice larger flat screen TV on a wall with no cables coming to or leaving from it... but is seems this isn't possible with digital TV: you always seems to need those ugly set-top-boxes. Unless you put the box in a centralised storage room and stream the video feel over ethernet cables from there, but even then you need a set-top box per TV in the house, which I find ridiculous... I would need at least five of these stupid boxes...

You don't need 1 box per TV if you're willing to accept that you can't have every TV showing something different. If there is only X number of people in the house on average then you won't normally need more than X tuners/boxes.

Ok, scratch that. Currently it's just my wife and our son, but we plan on a second child. So that will be four set-top-boxes (eventually)
At least there's one bit of hope: our son is only a few weeks old now, and his sibling doesn't even exist yet. So by the time they both will want a TV in their room (say at least ten years from now), I'm hoping there will be a solution for this problem.
I'm guessing all I can do in the meantime is put as much future-proof cable in the walls as possible. I might even put in fiber, even though I absolutely have no reason or need for it now at all. But I'm guessing it might be useful in the future...

I must say I find it really stupid and maddening that all this is possible without a problem with 40 year old technology (analog TV), but new technology (digital TV) simply can't do this. That's not progress in my book. I wouldn't even care about this for the smaller TV sets in the house (eg. in the kitchen), but I don't want to risk putting those solely on analog knowing that in a number of years in the future, analog TV will dissapear completely. I can't imagine that those digital TV manufacturers haven't considered the fact that almost everybody has more than one TV set in their house nowadays. If they did consider this and decided they didn't care, that's just plain negligence...

Digital TV is available over-the-air for free, and without the restrictions of cable/satellite TV, in most regions. It's all a question of how strong the addiction is for specific channels.

Not in Belgium. In fact, the first (and only so far) company that provides Belgian channels via satellite subscription has only started their service three years ago or so.
But of course, to be able to receive these channels, you need their special smartcard. There are no Belgian TV free-to-air channels available, not even the regular channels. (I'm not even talking about specific subscription-based channels) I know, we live in the middle ages...