Hardware choice for a future proof DVB-S2(X) / DVB-T setup

Samuel

Hi,

I've just set up a dish to play around with satellite TV. I got a GTmedia V9 Prime just for testing while I design a proper setup. The dish is located on the side of a shack outside the house. This shack has a "radio closet" where I have different antenna feeds coming in + power and Ethernet.
Currently, I only have one satellite feed, but I will probably add a second one with an offset mount plus a DVB-T feed at some point into the mix.

Inside the house I have a server rack I would like to host TVHeadend with plenty of storage and compute + the CA card reader in order to aggregate and process the feeds.

I spent a few days reading, and I'm struggling to select the proper hardware to have a future-proof setup for both DVB-T2 and DVB-S2X on a reasonable budget (around 200eur max).

Right now for satellite I'm looking at the following options:

Digibit Twin
- Pros: Seemingly easy setup
- Cons: 100Mbit/s Ethernet & Only DVB-S2
Sundtek SkyTV Dual UHD 2x (DVB-S/S2/S2X) + Raspberry Pi 4/5 with a second tvheadend or pisat or something else purely as a SAT>IPserver
- Pros: Supports DVB-S2X, better flexibility
- Cons: Far from plug&play

From what I read, the easiest way to get something working is to use a SAT>IP box but I'm concerned about the 100Mbit limit. I was looking at the Eutelsat 5W network list and there are quite a few mux that are over 60Mbit/s which with two tuners will exceed the 100Mbit Ethernet link.
On the other hand, I'm unsure if this is actually be a problem in practice, especially since from what I read, satip includes PID filters.
Likewise, I'm unsure if S2X is useful. From what I saw, there are very few frequencies that use S2X

As for terrestrial, my current plan is to use a pi2 as a SATIP server with the TV hat, any suggestion on how to do this better are welcome.

Thanks!

DeltaMikeCharlie

What frontend(s) are you planning to use to watch live TV/recordings?

The Pi2 may be unnecessary because TVH can manage input from multiple tuner cards concurrently spanning multiple protocols. You can plug your DVB-Sx and DVB-Tx tuners into the same TVH 'server' hardware.

60Mbit/s would be the mux throughput, but how many services would use the mux's entire bandwidth?

Samuel

What frontend(s) are you planning to use to watch live TV/recordings?

Probably a mix of Kodi, TvhClient and VLC

The Pi2 may be unnecessary because TVH can manage input from multiple tuner cards concurrently spanning multiple protocols. You can plug your DVB-Sx and DVB-Tx tuners into the same TVH 'server' hardware.

That was my thought too, if I go with the Sundtek dongle I'll put the TV hat on the same PI.
The pi2 was if I went with the Digibit Twin

I assume TVHeadend can expose multiple tuners via SAT>IP ?

60Mbit/s would be the mux throughput, but how many services would use the mux's entire bandwidth?

If you look at the 11096.00Hz frequency of Eutelsat 5W the network bitrate is 65.2Mbit/s and only part of the channels I want to watch are on this frequency.
If I wish to get the full mux of two frequencies I will exceed 100Mbit no?
Or am I reading this wrong and the bitrate displayed is only the max possible on this frequency, not the current usage?

Markus Rechberger (Sundtek)

The Dual Tuner was tested with more than 200mbit (two independent transport streams), there's some very large streaming buffer compared with all other devices we have (over 1mbit). Live TV has to be transferred to the PC as fast as possible you don't want high latency so the utilization should be low.

The dual tuner shows up as 2 independent tuners in the system.

Samuel

The Dual Tuner was tested with more than 200mbit (two independent transport streams) there's some very large streaming buffer compared with all other devices we have (over 1mbit)

Thanks for the information, how big is the buffer? 1-5sec of latency is totally fine for me.
Is 200mbit/s the max the dongle does or is it the max you tested?

Markus Rechberger (Sundtek)

Samuel the dual tuner has more than 500kbit per transport channel. More than one mbit total (for the dual tuner). Back then in 2016 we implemented a dual tuner with an asic only we had issues with channels passing out randomly on various systems.
The usual buffer size is only a few kbit -- this is totally different as what you would think in Software. The entire mechanism is hardware based.

Chris G

11096? So Fransat?
As far as I'm aware, you don't need a CA module, just a simple card reader and OSCAM.
Several people share this package with me.

Samuel

Chris G

11096? So Fransat?
As far as I'm aware, you don't need a CA module, just a simple card reader and OSCAM.
Several people share this package with me.

Yeah you're right, I meant a simple card reader.
As you can probably guess, I'm new to all this!

Is there a situation where a full CA module would be required?

Chris G

Samuel

You should ask if your card can be used in OSCAM over on https://www.linuxsat-support.com/
If your card can be used with OSCAM, you bypass any limitations imposed by the official CA module (simultaneous channel decoding etc).
A simple card reader is also much cheaper.
You also have the option of sharing it with other peers if you like.
For example, I share my card with people I met on forums in exchange for access to their cards.

Samuel

Chris G
From what I read, it seems to be ok for HD but not UHD
Which is the behavior that the GtMedia box exhibits, HD works UHD doesn't
But I guess I'll see.

Chris G

Samuel
Sorry, I don't know.
Ask the guys on that forum.
That appears to be correct, though, as I can't open Fransat UHD channels with the shares I have.

Samuel

Markus Rechberger (Sundtek)

the dual tuner has more than 500kbit per transport channel. More than one mbit total (for the dual tuner).

So a 1mbit buffer in hardware and max bandwidth of 200mbit/s total ?

The usual buffer size is only a few kbit -- this is totally different as what you would think in Software. The entire mechanism is hardware based

Yeah I'm familiar with hardware mechanisms. But there could be some latency introduced by the driver.

get the USB Tuner and try it you will see that you are very close to plug and play including full flexibility plus future proof.
We also support minisatip.
Installing the driver takes 5-10 seconds.
MiniSATIP is also quick.

You're closer to plug and play than you might think.

When I say plug&play I'm talking about the whole setup.
I agree that plugging the tuner and installing a driver is easy but that also means I need a system to install the driver to.
But as you said, it is probably the most flexible and future-proof option.

I just did a test with the raspberry TV hat and minisatip which did work.
I need to do some further tests, but I'm most likely going to end up using the Sundtek dongle

Markus Rechberger (Sundtek)

Cons: Far from plug&play

get the USB Tuner and try it you will see that you are very close to plug and play including full flexibility plus future proof.
We also support minisatip.
Installing the driver takes 5-10 seconds.
MiniSATIP is also quick.

You're closer to plug and play than you might think.

Markus Rechberger (Sundtek)

Samuel we tested something like 220-240 mbit two transponders (digitally generated the transport stream data pattern and fed it into the system).
But we have not found any transponder in Europe which goes that high, since the tuners are on the market for quite some time we haven't seen any issues so far with various dish networks.