The dream is starting to become a reality… This bad-boy is a satellite tuner card designed to receive both ordinary DVB-S signals AND the high definition DVB-S2 signals used by C4HD and BBC 1 HD. More importantly, it has four separate tuners on-board allowing you to plug it in to a quad LNB to record channels from 4 multiplexes simultaneously.
It’s probably best I jump back a bit here and remind you of what I’m trying to achieve. You may remember the new home server with 6x 2TB drives in? Well all that storage wasn’t for nothing – I plan to use the server for not only storage and media streaming, but also as a TV Server. The TV Server will contain a number of tuner cards, and stream TV over regular Ethernet cabling throughout the house to PCs, laptops, or specially built home theatre PCs connected to TVs. The idea is that the server becomes the only place in the house where aerials / satellite cabling is terminated, and ordinary Ethernet cables take care of the rest of the house. Want to watch a program you recorded in the lounge but you are now in the bedroom? Not a problem, all recordings are held centrally on the server.
So, step 1 is complete – I have a server. Step 2, fit the server with as many TV tuners as possible is underway. I already have a standard definition Freeview tuner in the server, but I wanted HD and the most reliable way to get that here in South Wales is via satellite. The TBS6984 is a beast of a card, requiring a full-height PCI Express x1 socket AND a dedicated PCI Express power supply. As you can see from the image on the right, at the top-right of the image you can see the internal power input connector. Now, luckily my 
power supply has two such outputs, usually reserved for high end graphics cards. I plugged my power supply straight in to the card and away it went. For those of you without a spare PCI Express power output, you have the option of using the provided molex adapter – you will need THREE spare molex connectors though! (see image).
Once installed, you’ll need some software to go with it. It supports Windows Media Center with no playing around – now I’d suggest when you do install the card, you install just the drivers and not the supplied software package. Let Windows take care of the rest because the interface is superb. Sadly for me, though, Windows Media Center does not support Windows Home Server and the in-house distribution features I am after. I may have mentioned this before, but I have chosen MediaPortal as the TV Server of choice. (For reference, I’m using the release candidate of 1.2.0 and not the older 1.1.3 which doesn’t appear to work very well with DVB-S2 high definition satellite broadcasts for me).
Now, the major stumbling block for satellite broadcasts is the EPG (Electronic Program Guide). Freeview broadcasts as EPG, Freesat and Sky also have EPGs, but MediaPortal can’t use the Freeview one for satellite (it just doesn’t have all the same channels) and no-one has managed to write a simple EPG plugin to read Sky or Freesat’s EPGs… so the solution is to grab an XML based one off the web. Luckily MediaPortal has a plugin called WebEPG which does this, but you will need to manually map your channels to the relevant XML feed which is straightforward enough.
So, buying this card… now, it isn’t cheap, and when I purchased this a few weeks ago there were only two options: eBay or Hong Kong (probably the same place?). I chose Hong Kong, buying direct from www.buydvb.net using PayPal – it was quick delivery and cheaper than eBay. However since then I’ve noticed it available for less money on Amazon – hence the shameless product placement picture at the top of this article. It’s also worth noting that if you don’t plan to use it in a server, then it comes with a useful remote control, and that you can get single and dual tuner versions too. I’d highly recommend this card overall – especially as it allows you to cram four tuners in to a single expansion slot.
Mmm, vibratory. I imported mine from Hong Kong early in the year before they were available over here and it was a good purchase – they are on sale now over here for a lot more than I paid.
My birthday present… built in compass, barometer, thermometer, altimeter, auto-light, solar panel, tidal/moon phase, radio controlled time updates. And it tells the time too.
The hub of my home cinema featuring HDMI upscaling from any video source and producing the best all-round sound I’ve ever heard from a TV.. before this toy I always had an issue with previous sound systems where the vocals whilst watching a film were too quite.. you’d pump the volume up then suddenly there’s an explosion or car horn on screen causing the real world floor to crack under increased dB.. no more is this an issue!
I’ve only had it a couple of weeks but so far I’m very impressed. Quiet and light on the power, it’s made the constant hum from the server in my study go away. It has loads of features I’ve yet to explore and there’ll be a blog update soon on that I hope.
This year’s winner.. allowing me to ditch Sky+ and watch and record high definition telly without a subscription. All hail Freesat+. As a further update to my previous review, copying files off the internal hard drive is easy (minimal fiddling required to deal with the .ts file format) but BBC-HD content is protected and can’t currently be (easily) copied. I would offer a link here so as you can go and buy one, but they are in such short supply and high demand at the moment that there’s really no point. Comet and Argos are the best bets if you wanted to try but you would be better off waiting a couple of months.
Finally.. after many months of eager anticipation I have my beloved shiny new freesat+ box. OK, so the only programs I’ve actually watched in HD are “In The Night Garden” and some Chinese cookery show, but that isn’t the point. Tomorrow I will be able to phone up Sky and cancel my subscription. It’ll be an historic moment as I’ve been a customer since I moved out from my parent’s house. OK, so the bad points regarding the foxsat-hdr box first: (1) There isn’t much HD content at the moment, just BBC HD and the occasional bit on ITV1 via a press of the red button, but that’s not the fault of the box and things can only get better there. (2) It’s a little bit slow to respond compared to my Sky+ box. (3) The remote control is sexy looking but not as sensitive to use. (4) I can’t fully get my One-for-all remote to learn it’s functions (I have a code which gives 90% functionality, but I can’t the a button for viewing recordings to work.. quite crucial really). (5) Spooks isn’t in HD. (6) The supplied remote can control all my equipment.. but there is no ‘volume-punch-through’ function which would allow the volume buttons to control the amplifier’s volume whilst in freesat mode.
