[Gllug] MythTV on an (ex-)Sky+ satellite dish?

[Pete Ryland]

On 10/10/06, Richard Jones <rich at annexia.org> wrote:
>
> A friend of mine has just moved into a house which happens to have a
> Sky satellite dish installed.  Two plugs connected to the dish are
> exposed in the living room.  Apparently there was a "Sky Plus" box
> attached before.
>
> Is this compatible with anything MythTV?  I'm imagining that he's got
> some sort of Murdochish-proprietary standard.  He only wants to watch
> Freeview.


Yes, but he'll need the right DVB card.  There are DVB-T, DVB-C and DVB-S
cards for terrestrial, cable and satellite, respectively.  A lot of the
DVB-S cards will come with a slot for pay channel descramblers, but it
should be usable for Freeview without a card and without paying a
subscription.  If it's pointed at the Sky satellite already, then I'm almost
certain they still broadcast the free stuff unscrambled (but please check on
this first, as I have an inkling this may have changed).  Also, I've heard
that there are various dark corners of the internet where you can obtain the
descrambling keys for the pay channels too, but apparently there are many
keys to obtain for each multiplex, which change on a regular basis, some
weekly, some monthly and some yearly or longer.

Please note that I don't have a satellite dish or DVB-S card, so I may be
wrong on these details, but I have seen a very cool MythTV set up in the
Netherlands which used a special motorised satellite dish which could pick
up signals from quite a number of different satellites, even Swedish ones!
Apparently, all the geostationary TV satellites orbit the equator, so the
further north they point, the wider their transmission area has to be.

Oh, and make sure he gets a DVB card which can pass the data on, not just
decode it to a TV out - in earlier days, the ones to get were called
"budget" cards because they didn't contain an MPEG decoder, instead relying
on the processor.  If the feature list contains phrases like "save your
favourite programs to disk" or "time shift" then it's probably ok.  I think
these days, most of the cards are like this anyway.

Pete
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