Excellent response, & thank-you for so much detail!
I apologise for my anaemic response, but it is very late here now,
that's my excuse anyway! ;)
Just curious, why did you pick VDR over MythTV?
I would rather use the later + OSCam (maybe) if feasible.
Thanks again for the excellent feedback, it's heartening to know there's
other videoguard2 users out there!
Good-night.
On 3/05/10 5:49 PM, Bjørn Mork wrote:
[answering this in private since any details about softcams etc usually
is unwanted on mailinglists]
Jed<jedi.theone@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
I was wondering if someone could recommend a decent DVB-C tuner card?
Ideally it would be a dual DVB-C card, but I'm not sure they exist?!
I've been looking for the same, but not been able to find one. The
closest is the foilware from Netup, but it is probably going to be too
expensive when/if it is available anyway.
Nor does there seem to be any DVB-C PCIe cards or USB sticks with Linux
support. There are rumours about working external USB boxes. I haven't
verified those, as I didn't really want any external box adding to the
cable mess...
I have a subscription to a PayTV provider here in Australia that uses
an encryption scheme called NDS or Videoguard2.
So I'll also need the right card reader and combo of software in order
to decrypt and then capture.
I'm doing much of the same here, also using NDS/Videoguard2. Unless
I've missed something, this excludes using any (official) hardware CAM
so you don't have to worry about CI slots :-)
I am using two budget cards ("budget" is a must, as they are the cards
capable of delivering a full TS to the host):
1) TerraTec Cinergy C PCI:
bjorn@canardo:~$ lspci -vvnns 5:0
05:00.0 Multimedia controller [0480]: Twinhan Technology Co. Ltd Mantis DTV PCI Bridge Controller [Ver 1.0] [1822:4e35] (rev 01)
Subsystem: TERRATEC Electronic GmbH Device [153b:1178]
Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
Status: Cap- 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=medium>TAbort-<TAbort+<MAbort->SERR-<PERR- INTx-
Latency: 64 (2000ns min, 63750ns max)
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 16
Region 0: Memory at fcfff000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=4K]
Kernel driver in use: Mantis
Kernel modules: mantis
2) Mystique CaBiX-C2 (available from www.dvbshop.net):
bjorn@canardo:~$ lspci -vvnns 5:1
05:01.0 Multimedia controller [0480]: Philips Semiconductors SAA7146 [1131:7146] (rev 01)
Subsystem: KNC One Device [1894:0022]
Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
Status: Cap- 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium>TAbort-<TAbort-<MAbort->SERR-<PERR- INTx-
Latency: 64 (3750ns min, 9500ns max)
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 17
Region 0: Memory at feaffc00 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512]
Kernel driver in use: budget_av
Kernel modules: budget-av
The TerraTec card is working very well, but requires the mantis driver
which entered linux in 2.6.33. This means that there are few
distributions providing it at the moment, as most of them are going for
2.6.32.
The Mystique card also does it's job, but I have had a few problems with
the driver when some other part of the system is failing (in my case, a
SATA disk). The driver seems to be very fragile wrt timeouts, and is
far too eager to fill the log with identical useless messages. I'm
planning to fix this as soon as I get around to it, but...
If I were to buy the cards a second time, then I think I would buy two
Terratec cards.
For smartcard reader I am using a simple and cheap reader from OmniKey:
bjorn@canardo:~$ lsusb -s 5:2
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 076b:3021 OmniKey AG CardMan 3121
I've also tested with another CCID USB reader, SCM SCR331, which also
worked just fine. What you want to look for is a reader supported by
libccid ("apt-cache show libccid" in Debian/Ubuntu will show you the
list). You may also want to check out which voltages the readers
support. Modern cards tend to lower their Vcc all the time, and there
are a few stories of burnt cards (I assume that's because of running a
3.3 V card in a reader only capable of providing 5 V).
This stuff I can mostly work out for myself.....
But if you have any knowledge or experience in that area, then I'd be
most appreciative if you can share.
As it definitely isn't for technical minnows!
Oh and in case you're worried, doing this sort of thing is not -yet-
illegal in Australia.
That's the situation here in Norway as well, provided that you actually
pay for the subscription. At least that's my interpretation of the
legal status :-)
When I started this project, I briefly tried sasc-ng. I did work OK but
I disliked the need to use the dvbloopback module. Mostly a principle
wrt out-of-tree drivers. But I would probably have continued to use it
if I hadn't discovered that VDR provided everything I needed (I
initially rejected it because I got the wrong impression that it
couldn't run on a headless box, which is what I do). The VDR softcam
plugin eliminates the need for any in-kernel hacks. It's all just
userspace.
So now I am happily using VDR with vdr-sc. I could not make the
videoguard2 smartcard driver for vdr-sc working (didn't try hard -
probably only a minor configuration problem on my side), but am instead
using vdr-sc as a cardclient against oscam. I've built oscam with PCSC
support so that all card communication goes through pcscd.
This setup works for me, but I'm still not 100% sure that card updates
are working. There is something weird with the interface between vdr-sc
and oscam. So there are certainly some bugs to sort out, both in vdr-sc
and in oscam. But one of my main reasons for choosing these over other
options is the open source. This does make it possible to fix bugs and
contribute. And both packages do have active developers who respond to
the reports and suggestions they get.
The list of mostly working features:
- decrypting multiple channels simultaneously. Of course limited to the
two frequecies which I can tune, but there doesn't seem to be any
other limit on the number of channels I can use
- both HD and SD decryption (also when using a subscription card from a
SD only STB!)
- automatic configuration of the smartcard/STB mating. This is
currently a bit flakey but work is on the way to improve it. You
can always work around it by configuring "BoxID" manually, so it's
not a big problem anyway
Hope this helps. Looking forward to hearing how things go. The more
open source Videoguard2 users we get, the better :-)
Bjørn
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