Re: MCE with DTV & Sky

["noughtomate" <balraj_jassal@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have the internal FireDTV kit on my HTPC.

It works by allowing you to plug in a CAM to the Fire DTV PCI card. So
if you use the likes of a Dragon Cam card, it will decrypt your SKy
signal. Free to air channels can be viewed but with the Sky card
plugged into the Cam you can view alot more.

If you only have a single LNB feed, you'll have to use a Digibox which
supports a pass through or to use a Signal splitter and ensure you Sky
digibox is switched off when using MCE Sky capture.

When installing the drivers you have the choice of installing BDA or
MCE specific drivers. The MCE ones mimic DVB-T although the signal is
DVB-S, hence MCE is led to beleive that it's a regular terrestrial
signal and is able to capture the MPEG-2 Transport stream.

If you install the BDA drivers, you can use other PVR software such as
the excellent DVB Viewer or GB-PVR. These will allow you to capture as
DVB-S, however it will not be avilable to MCE.

The driver set up also allows you to specify your dish direction which
should be 28.2 for Sky.

Channel scanning on MCE can take about 10 minutes.

The biggest challenge for most users is that the EPG is not aligned to
Sky. So if you want Cbeebies on 614, then you'll have to do alot of
Guide browsing until you familrise yourself with the MCE version of
the Guide. There are hacks which discuss this, but the majority of
users have not had any joy setting it up (check out AV Forums MCE
thread. Nigel BB and Julian are the MCE-Sky Kings relating to this).

I have my Vista MCE in a dual boot 32 bit Home Premium and 64-bit
Ultimate configuration, so I've got BDA drivers on 64-bit and MCE
drivers on 32-bit.

So, if I want to use my HTPC as a true MCE based PVR I boot up in 32-
bit. If I want to capture DVB-S specifically for BBC HD then I use 64-
bit mode, but I'm forced to use DVB-Viewer software instead.

It works a charm. Occasionally you have to unplug the cam to get
things working.

The FireDTV kit uses Firewire connectivity only (although it sits in
PCI slots, there's no physical electronic connection with the PCI bus.
There is an internal Firewire connector which must be plugged
internally to the Motherboard or externally to a Firewire port). As a
result of this Firewire connection, many users have experienced
problems from wake up from Standby when a scheduled recording is due
to start. Basically MCE can't find the tuner so the recording fails.

So this method isn't full proof. Again, there's further discussion on
this on AV Forums under the MCE threads.

If you want the best signal available to MCE, then this is the one to
use. MCE over analog at best supports S-Video, so the MPG-2 Transport
Stream Picture Quality will be far superior.

Also take into account that MCE doesn't nativly decode H.264 - only
MPG2. So you'll never be able to capture High Def channels which
broadcast in H.264 for High Definition.

Although BBC HD is broadcast in MPEG-2, the MCE channel scan doesn't
find it. (Hence why I use DVB-Viewer using the BDA drivers)

There's plenty of rumour that the next MCE release will support H.264
in the next release but I'm sceptical about this.

Any other questions - ask away...