FF Rev. 2.1 DVB-S Cards
DVB-S full-featured PCI card, revision 2.1.
Sold by Hauppauge which have an onboard MPEG decoder and have originally been derived from the old Siemens cards. Based on an SAA7146 PCI bridge and an AV711x MPEG2 Decoder they look quite old-fashioned now but have worked reliably for a long time and been the base for Projects like VDR.
These cards used over time many different Demodulators and tuner modules, some examples are the STV0299 and the TDA8083.
A major drawback of this design is the low maximum Bus Bandwidth limited by the AV711x, HDTV receiption or raw MPEG2 Transport Stream access is not possible.
Since even HDTV MPEG2 Decoders implemented in software perform well on every modern PC there is usually no need for cards with onboard MPEG2 Decoder today. An exception may be special software that relies on proprietary card features like VDR.
Linux Support for these cards is quite stable. A Firmware is required and available for download on http://www.linuxtv.org/.
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