FireDTV / FloppyDTV + Sky Digital

[Teaboy]

I want to view Sky Digital on my HTPC, and I'm moving home and won't be taking my Sky box with me. Even if I was - I'm not entirely happy with the buffer delay of the MPEG cards which makes channel browsing very tedious.

I'm basically wondering if anyone has successfully received all channels (Free to air, Sky Movies, Sky Sports, Sky Box Office) with a FireDTV and/or FloppyDTV.

If so, what hardware is needed? I keep hearing about a Dragon Cam (?)

Will this setup support HDTV? Sky will be broadcasting in HD soon!

I know there are hundreds of threads all asking similar questions but I can't find someone who has actually got it working.

Your comments are apprieciated!

[hoppy]

Hi Teaboy,

Beter late than never I hope!

I've got it working, using a fireDTV DVB-S and a dragon cam. I can recieve all the channels I've tried to recieve so far, which is pretty much the whole of the basic package. I don't have movies or sports, so I can't comment on those, but if the dragon cam seems to work, I don't see any reason why it won't be able to decode them.

The only real problem I have found so far is that you have to put you sky card back in your sky box about once every two months. I think it somehow "pings" the sky card to continue working. Without a two monthly ping, the card simply stops working, but can be fixed by leaving it in your sky box for a little while. This will probably be a big draw back for you as, by the sound of it, you won't have a sky box!

If you get your dragon cam from here:

http://www.firedtv.co.uk/

they will pre-load the loader card with the preditor firmware so you don't need a card reader/loader.

Technically, this set up should be HD compatible, but I don't know if it works as I don't have a SkyHD subscription. The beeb are starting trials next month on Astra, so I'll test that out an let you know.

[Teaboy]

Thanks for the reply

I've actually moved in already, and I just got a new sky box instead. But I'm still very interested in this set up.

Have you managed to get the box office channels working?

I'm very tempted to order one now... :lol:

[hoppy]

I don't think it would be possible to get the box office stuff working. I suppose it should be possible, if you ordered it using the sky box, did a new channel scan once you've been authorised to view it, and picked up the new channel, but it would be a lot a effort!

I will warn you that the process of getting this working has been fairly painful! Media Portal is the only decent Personal Video Recorder software that supports the Common Interface of the FloppyDTV. It used to be fairly unusable, as it used to crash a lot, but over the past couple of months, due to a valiant effort by the developers, it is pretty stable now and getting better all the time.

THe major bug bear at the moment is the "No Signal" bug, but that is being well aired on the forums and lots of people are lending a hand testing and it should hopfully be resolved soon. To be honest, it dosn't really cause me many problems.

I would say that you are probably getting into this about the right time, I think I was slightly early!

There are other PVR's that will probably support the CI in the future, but none are open source or free. This is probably not the place to mention them

[Teaboy]

Thanks for all the information

I'll probably order one this week.

[Flipit]

Reading this forum and notice the comment on HD.

Thought I'd better clarify, this is all on the Fired DTV forum too, but took me a while to find.

Both FireDTV and FloppyDTV support HD broadcasts since the decoding of the transport stream is software based N.B. An MPEG4 codec would be needed. Some HD stream in DVB-S are avialable.. Kingofsat webiste lists them all.

However, most providers will move to the DVB-S2 standard when they moved to MPEG4. FireDTV only supports DVB-S so new hardware would be required to demodulate the -S2 stream.

SKY UK HD will be DVB-S2 MPEG4..

Good news is that the Digital-Everywhere team are aware of this and hope to have a working product for DVB-S2 some time before the end of the year...

However there is no garantee that when the providers move to new standard that they will keep their current encyption algorythmns.... so using the Trex/Dragon CAM may not work...so far SKY are making sounds that they will stick with the current NDS implementation...don't hold your breath though...though the predator is never far behind ;-)

As you can probably imagine small companies like digital everywhere are reluctant to invest in new hardware products they may not be able sell.

Anyway to answer the question.. HD is supported if the modulation is DVB-S, new hardware will be needed if the modulation is DVB-S2.

Enjoy

[hoppy]

I can confirm that the floppyDTV is indeed HD compatible (DVB-S as noted above), as I've managed to get the BBC HD trial working, although it dosn't work in MediaPortal yet as I don't think they support the H.264 encryption used by the bbc.

[Phunky]

Has anyone been able to get BBC HD to work via Media Portal yet? I can get every SD channel working fine with my FloppyDTV but have yet been able to get BBC HD to work.

[mclog]

Anybody found a CAM that can take the updates without going back into the Sky digibox?

[allanp81]

I'm interested in this also.