Which DVB tuner w/CI for MP in Switzerland? (1 Viewer)

[rsbrux]

Because I have given up hope of ever getting 2 ch. multilingual audio support for analog TV in MP, I am considering moving up to digital TV. Unlike most people in Switzerland, who are stuck with Cablecom/UPC, I am considering DVB-C as well as DVB-S(2). My local cable provider, WWZ, still uses CI, not CI+, and has no plans to change. This lead to 2 questions:
1. DVB-C vs. DVB-S?
Since I don't really need any more channels than WWZ offers in the free basic package, the initial investment for DVB-C (CAM + smart card) would probabaly be less than for DVB-S. I could also imagine that using DVB-S might require me to get more than one smart card, depending on whether or how national broadcasts (DE, AT, UK, FR, etc.) are protected on satellite. What can anyone tell me about how this works in EUrope generally?
2. Which TV card?
The cheapest models I have found with CI support come from Terratec (Cinergy), but it seems as though many MP users (as well as developers) have had problems. Hauppauge has a new hybrid card (HVR-5500) which looks like it can do anything. This looks attractive to me, since it supports DVB-S as well as DVB-C, in case I start out with cable but want to migrate to satellite later. It also has an analog video input for transcribing my old VHS tapes. Unfortunately, I haven't found any reports on it yet. Any suggestions?
TIA!

 

[mm1352000]

Hi rsbrux

Before we talk about new cards, lets talk about dual-mono. My understanding is that each channel of the stream has to be labelled with different audio languages, and then you would use the "enable dual-mono audio switching" setting in the "audio settings" tab in the "TV client" section in MediaPortal configuration to enable switching between the tracks in MP. TV Server does not support the labelling of the channels with different languages for analog. The reason for that is that language information is not available from the broadcast... so we are limited because the broadcast doesn't tell us that the stream is dual mono. It is assumed that both audio channels are the same language for best compatibility. If you had a digital tuner with correctly labelled tracks then I'd expect it to work straight away with the right settings.

Having said all that, you could force it to work with codecs configured in a specific way. In particular, the FFDShow "mixer" section could achieve what you want. To see how to do that have a look at this thread for a start. From that, hopefully you would understand that you can set up FFDShow to mix audio in completely customised ways. In your case, you would mix all the audio from the left (or right, depending on your preferred language) channel into *both* the left and right outputs and save that as your default configuration. See the attached screenshots to see what I mean. The first case is for choosing audio from the left channel; the second is the right channel. Keep in mind that you wouldn't be able to switch between languages without changing FFDShow settings... but that may be okay for you if you don't have any other TV sources and you don't have other TS files.

Any thoughts?

mm

 

[mm1352000]

In fact, I have never used the "enable audio dual-mono" setting. If you enable it then you *can* switch settings within MediaPortal, *even when the channels are the same language*. See the attached screenshots...