[vdr] Best DVB-S card

[Udo Richter]

> Glyn Edwards wrote:
>> > I've been looking at the Nexus-S because it is fully featured and I
>> > don't 
>> > have any spare PCI slots left. With a FF card I could remove the DXR3. 

All FF cards are basically cards made by Technotrend, and in my opinion 
it doesn't make any difference whether the card has a Hauppauge sticker 
on it or not. More important is the card revision number (1.3, 1.5, 1.6, 
2.1, 2.2, 2.3), as this describes the card's hardware and extension 
possibilities more closely.

For details:
http://www.vdr-wiki.de/wiki/index.php/DVB-S_full-featured-Karten
http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/PCI_devices_DVB-S


Carsten Koch wrote:
> If your VDR PC works fine with the DXR3, I would not recommend
> a fully featured DVB-S card. It is more expensive than a budget
> card and its firmware is still not mature. See the long thread
> about "FF card A/V sync" in this mailing list.

I do read a lot more about issues with DXR3 cards than with FF cards 
though. For me there is not a single sync issue for any of the German TV 
stations. The only issue I know is simultaneous recording and 
transfer-mode playback of high bandwidth channels (ARD), and this 
usually mostly hits people with just one sat card. Beside that, FF cards 
have been highly stable for me for years.

> It also crashes
> if you tune into HDTV channels.

... which are especially useful for either FF cards or DXR3 cards. ;)
Plus, there are no FF cards that are capable of receiving the real 
DVB-S2 HDTV channels, only the few mpeg2-HDTV channels may cause 
trouble, and these will die over time anyway.

Cheers,

Udo