Satellite TV in Media Center Setups (could also apply to Cable)

Hi all,

Mutation666 asked on the PGP stream on Sunday about the setup I use for distributing satellite TV around my LAN and I said I'd post the pdf if I found it, as I created it a long time ago.

Anyway I found it on an old AVForums post from 2010:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxdzGbRg_pqtaWdrQVUySHhwcm8/view?usp=sharing

I'll update this hopefully over Christmas as much of it is out of date but the principles still apply (virtualised tuners on the LAN). These days the clients are using Kodi with the DVBLogic plug-in - it still runs great.

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I will 'sort of' be doing something similar but isn't networked yet and so I can't test it.

I got rid of my satellite provider recently and I'm using free to air satelite services now. I got a linux based box (clone of Amiko Alien 2 tripple tuner, 2x DVB S and DVB T) which runs the reciever software Enigma2. Looking around I saw Kodi has an Enigma2 plugin and so can pull the streams over the network with no extra hardware.

Looking at that diagram, it seems you have 3/4 lnb connections going directly to a media PC which, handles recording and allows for multiple people to watch separate streams on each client? My setup only allows for two sat connections and one terestrial connection (via the sat box which handles recording) and then can passthrough connections to kodi clients via network.

Yes that's right the 3 tuners are intelligently shared for a max of 3 different channels watched/recorded at the same time. If 2 or more clients are watching the same channel then they use the same tuner card.

You can also select where recording happens (on either the client or the main MCE box/server, so you can record on one client and watch on another without disrupting each stream.

The 4th LNB goes into the Dreambox, which handles entitlements for encrypted channels, although you wouldn't need this for free to view stuff.