really good dvb-s card

[hubers]

hello everybody,
i am playing with mediaportal since 8 month now and it is a realy great peace of software for digital living stuff!
but i have some poroblems to find a dvb-s card with good support in mediaportal... this means good bda drivers.

following hardware:
i have a twinhan dvb-s pci card and a terratec cinergy 1200 dvb-s pci card. i am living in germany and i whant to receive my tv programm over the astra satelites.

following tests i made:
my old legacy standalone dvb-s receiver can find about 500 channels with 98db singal strength on all channels.
with the bundled tv software of the two pci cards i can receive all the 500 channels with the terratec card. with the twinhan card only about 200 (e.g. no prosieben, sat1). i think this depends on the "cheap" tuner build on the twinhan card. the terratec uses a "better" philips tuner.

now i installed the bda drivers for the two card. both cards a supported with bda drivers and mediaportal 0.1.3 can find the cards. when i search the channels there is the same problem: 500 channels terratec, 200 channels twinhan.
another problem: with the twinhand card i get sound an picture when i try to watch tv in mediaportal. the terratec card finds the channels under the setup programm, but when i try to watch tv in mediaportal with this card, the sound is shuttering and the picture is black. i have heard of some problems with dvb-s cards, bda drivers build onto a pci-e mainboard.

now my question:
i have two dvb-s cards and both cards do not work correctly with bda -> mediaportal. i know that the problems seems to come from bad implemented bda drivers.
so can anybody of you tell me a dvb-s card with really good support of bda drivers / mediaportal?
i whant to buy a new dvb-s card and i whant to buy the right one this time :-)

greetings from germany
stefan

[dman_lfc]

Why not try a SkyStar 2...

I do have to say that with recent Twinhan driver updates I can scan more channles myself now but my SS2 provide strong signal strength.

DMAN

[hubers]

ok, so you have the same problem with the twinhan card that you can't receive all channels?
the technisat skystar 2 seems to be interesting. but where can i find bda drivers for the card?

[cleao]

SkyStar 2 do not work with BDA drivers just the native from Technisat. Unfortable it was the best option until a time ago for MP because of the flexibility that is provided by many programs like MyTheatre or ProgDVB that you can do everything you need in a home theather using mdplugins facilitie that MP do not provide anymore. :cry:

[hubers]

ok, so the SkyStar 2 seems to be not interesting.
isn't there anyone out there with a good working solution with astra and all the normal programms you can reveice with the simplest standalone dvb-s receiver?
twinhan seems to have good bda drivers but the tuner card can't tune to all transponders :-(

[hubers]

to get a little bit more concrete with the twinhan card:
on those transponders it can't tune

11973,V,27500
12246,V,27500
12441,V,27500
11739,V,27500
11778,V,27500
11817,V,27500
11856,V,27500
11895,V,27500
11934,V,27500
12012,V,27500
12051,V,27500
12129,V,27500
12168,V,27500
12207,V,27500
12285,V,27500
12324,V,27500
12363,V,27500
12402,V,27500
12480,V,27500

the card is directly connected with the lnb. the cable length is 5 meters.
the terratec card can tune to all channels correctly. but don't work with mediaportal and a pci-e board yet :-(

[eku60]

Hello hubers,

I'm having exact the same hardware and mine's working fine so far. When autotuning the TwinHan card and after that autotuning the Terratec card there are only few channels more. (5 or so). And watching proSieben for example is possible on both cards with nearly the same good quality (better than a standalone dvb receiver).
So there might be a problem with your installation.

Using MP 0.1.3 and zapping often leads to an unhandled exception (MP crashes) in XP. Don't know why.
Another problem is the missing DiSeqC functionality in the BDA drivers.
But a really stable Mediaportal would be more important for me.

regards,
eku60

[hubers]

hi eku60,

thank you for your reply. this is good to know that the twinhan card could work ;-)

what is the version of you bda drivers? what are your settings in the twinhan console (the tool in the status-bar). how are your cards connected to the lnb? what lnb are you using?

thank you for your help
stefan