TV card question

Dist · 29 May 2009 at 00:21

After noticing a thread about freesat in general discussion it has sparked my interest again in getting a TV card. After some research though i have found that freesat lacks some freeview channels as the satellite broadcasts over areas of europe as well as the UK, so some channels like virgin 1, five US, dave etc... are not available on freesat.

So my question is, does anyone know of a TV card that has an input for a satellite dish to recieve freesat, but also has an aerial input to allow it to view the missing channels that are available on freeview?

I know there are some TV cards that have multiple tuners to view multiple channels at the same time, but i have only seen ones with digital freeview tuners, and not 1 freeview 1 sat tuner. So if anyone could point out a product that would do what i would like that would be great.

Faffer · 29 May 2009 at 11:47

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-4000 should do the job.

errata · 29 May 2009 at 12:33

And some others. keywords to look for are DVB-T for freeview and DVB-S or prefereably DVB-S2 for satelite/reesat (DVB-S2 is a lilky future standard but not required, DVB-s is signifcnatly cheaper).

The software for vieweing is important. Windows media center has diffculties (there are workarounds) showing a channel from view then one from sat in the UK. It is possible to use manuracturers software or a combnination.

CompScienceKid · 29 May 2009 at 21:10

Also, if you want to be able to record and watch simultaneously you need a 'dual' card. Unfortuntly there are only dual DVB-T cards so you may need to buy two digital (DVB-S/2) cards, and this requires two separate aeriels

Dist · 29 May 2009 at 21:54

I thought multiple tuners is only if i want to watch one channel while recording a different channel. Surely the card Faffer would be able to record 1 sat channel and 1 freeview channel simultaniously, although it wouldn't be able to view any other chan while the recording is happening.

Even if thats not the case, why would i require separate aerials?

errata · 30 May 2009 at 08:43

multi input tuner cards can do one thing at a time, watch live or record one type of input source (the different tuners share hardware that prevents 2 tuners working at the same time)

dual tuner cards record 2 sources because they have complete sets of all the hardware needed but they are restricted to being the same type of source

for freesat or satelite your dish LNB needs to output from 1 wire for each tuner attached its not like an aerial that can be split. Most recent LNB can output 4 signals