in MythTV

Satellite Myth

Last night I took another hack at getting MythTV working with my DVB card. This time I was much more successful! The key was configuring Myth to use the LNB, which was hidden in the mythtv-setup under “capture cards-DiSEqC options. An LNB is not a DiSEqC, so I would’ve never thought to look there, but there it was.

MythTV was really built for DVB reception, both DVB-T and DVB-S, so it’s really in its element here. I fed it a custom channels.conf (generated by the dvb-utils’s scan app, which used a hand-made list of satellite transponders for input), and Myth not only scanned the channels I provided it but proceeded to tune all available channels from the satellite. I was pleasantly surprised when this process took less time than I expected. It even picked out the modulation and error-correcting modes of each signal automagically.

Myth’s impressive satellite scanning ability gives me confidence to install another dish and attempt to pull down some Ku-band wildfeeds. Anything that’s broadcast for a couple of minutes should be easily discovered by Myth, especially if there’s a known number of transponders to scan.

Geeky good times, this stuff.

  1. Very cool. Where did you pick up the DVB card again? I wonder if that would work with my unused DirecTV multi-satellite dish on the roof of my house….

  2. It will work with your dish, just not pointed at DirecTV satellites. DTV uses a bastardized version of the DVB-S standard. You can point it to other consumer DBS satellite services and get it to work, however.

    The card I have isn’t normally sold in the U.S. I had to find a distributor with a global reach that carried the card and also shipped to the U.S. It was tricky to find at the time. Amazon didn’t carry it.

    Just checked Google Shopping for it, and found it’s been discontinued. The Nova-S-Plus looks like the follow-on product and cheaper. Biggest difference I see is that the Nova-S-Plus doesn’t have composite video output like my Nexus-S does.

    Good luck!

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