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Advice for a potential UK customer if poss ?

Advice for a potential UK customer if poss ?

Postby byethecrin » Tue Feb 15, 2011 9:22 pm

Hi,

I am very interested in purchasing this card, however I was hoping for some advice before I take the plunge. I'll be honest having read the other posts in this forum, I would like to add that I am in no way that knowledgeable on the whole satellite setup etc, so if you could keep any answers in layman’s terms that would be great :)

Basically this card already fits the bill being low profile and PCI (unfortunately I have no PCIe slots available as my Graphics card is installed here), this is my first attempt at building a HTPC, my host unit is a Optiplex 380, with 4Gb RAM, Core 2 Duo 3Ghz processor, 330Gb internal and 2Tb external storage, Radeon 4550 HD 512MB HDMI graphics, Soundblaster Xtreme Audio XFi sound card.

From this unit I want to hook the 8921 card up to my existing FREESAT setup, I have the dish installed and working using the FREESAT tuner in my TV, however I want to run the signal through my HTPC in conjunction with Windows 7 Media Centre and be able to access all the SD and HD channels.

I am looking for something I will pretty much be able to take out of the box install drivers for, configure with W7MC and not really have to mess about with too much before it works, does this card fit the bill ? Also is the card a twin tuner, so will I be able to watch and record at the same time ?

Any other feedback/advice from others who have purchased this card, also reports on how well it works with HD channels would be gratefully received.

As this card and the TeVii seem to be the only low profile PCI's on the market at present, my only other alternative would be to get an interim DVB-T or DVB-S card for the time being and upgrade to T2 or S2 as the technology develops, with the possibility of an external USB T2 or S2 thrown into the mix.

Thanks
Rob
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Re: Advice for a potential UK customer if poss ?

Postby cody » Wed Feb 16, 2011 7:29 am

hi Rob,

since you don't have much experience in practice i don't want to add more confusion with giving you too much details. in general for W7MC usage 8921 should do the job well and it should handle all Freesat HD channels. however, 8921 is single DVB-S2 card and i doubt there is dual DVB-S2 card available on PCI interface. also, we're developing DVB-T2 card (in fact it's ready, but we still don't sell it), but it's again on PCI-Express interface as well as all our dual DVB-S2 card use PCI-Express interface. while i don't know details about your existing Freesat setup it could be necessary to replace you single LNB with dual in order to connect your dish to both your computer and your existing Freesat setup.

regards,
cody
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Re: Advice for a potential UK customer if poss ?

Postby jw300 » Fri Feb 18, 2011 1:44 am

Note that the term "Freesat" really refers to the group of Free-to-Air channels represented by the EPG. I don't think WMC captures the EPG information from the satellite transponders - it usually downloads more detailed guide information over the Internet, so the HTPC needs a connection for the daily updates. You may need to map this to specific channels if the names don't quite match. There are some alternative applications - such as DVBViewer - that will catch the Freesat EPG directly.

Also, although WMC works out regional channel selection from your postcode for terrestrial channels, I don't think it will do this for satellite, so you'll need to remove a lot of the unwanted duplicates. Channel numbering could need sorting as well.

This would all apply to any card you chose. No application will avoid the need to "mess about" if you want something that approaches the ease of use of a Freesat STB. WMC is simpler to use than most apps, though.

WMC7 out of the box did not handle the HD channels at all. I believe this was because it couldn't handle the Dolby Digital (AC3) sound that many of these channels use. Adding the AC3filter decoder helps, but you may still need to disable AC3 through the audio settings.
I recall setting the Auto sound level effectively limits the application to stereo, but some people have just played around with speaker settings.
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