G'day all,

I have a combined FE/BE with 5 PCI slots.
At the moment I have 2 tuner's, 1 PCI vga, 1 sound card and 1 spare slot that I want to put my DVB-S card in, I also will want a DVB-T at some point when we get it.

I will free up another slot when I move to a AGP output, but that will be it.

I suppose the best is to break the FE/BE or add a slave BE.

What are people doing about this lack of PCI slots?

_________________
--
stinga

as of 17-May-2018
R8.2 - sort of working.
MB: gigabyte GA-P43-ES3G | RAM: 2GB
VGA: PNY Nvidia GT240 1GB
4 x Technisat skystar 2 dvb | 1 x TBS6981 dvb-s2
pata: 1x300Gb | sata: 2x1Tb 2x2Tb
Problems:
TBS6981 Does not work.

PVR-500s get you two tuners for one slot.

The HDHomerun it a network appliance with two OTAHD/QAM tunners that takes no slots.

There are also USB tunners but have never tried them and not sure if there is support for them in linux.

After that as you suggested a slave backend

Yeah, what he said. I had to ditch one of my PCI HD tuners and get an HD Homerun box. The good news is that it works perfectly and I now have four HD tuners total. Lots of the mainboards which are PCI deficient have built-in video, so you may not need a vid card, saving another slot. Ditto for the built-in sound.

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Does the current HDHomerun honor the broadcast flag if it gets enabled by the tv stations in the future?

I use 4 usb DVB-T tuners without any problems.

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Paul Turpie
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I am in a similar situation as I am going to be getting rid of my socket 462 system and moving to faster processors- and mATX motherboards.

My solution is going to be to have master and slave backends, so that I need buy nothing new. (Electricity for the pair of mATX systems will be comparable to the current HIGH powered socket 462. )

Smaller systems do have some advantages, but lack of expansion slots can be a problem- but there ARE still boards with plenty of slots for those buying new hardware.

As mentioned, there are also external solutions available that work quite well.

Its all a matter of choosing priorities and designing accordingly.

I'll be investigating pci-e cards soon. My board has 3 pci-e slots, and they're apparently fast enough to run two HD cards without either of them being USB. Unfortunately, they're so new that they're hard to get and the chipsets are not really supported on linux yet.

Looks promising, though. My m/b (Intel DG965WH) has 3 pci-e + 3 pci + 1 pci-e (graphics), so one could in theory have 9 HD tuners, or 12 if the PCI's were all dual tuners on this board. Experience has shown the USB tuners to be unreliable, though.

Mike

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*********************
LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
*********************

This is another possible future option if it ever comes out

A compro900, it has 9 tuners on one card.
Look at the bottom of the linked page

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/sho ... i=3007&p=3

I think something is missing in translation. I see two RF inputs, and two RF tuner sections on board. I'm highly suspicious of the claim that it can display nine separate "tv or video inputs" simultaneously.

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Very true, I took a secound look and noticed the the display next to it says "Dual dvbt-t"

I just got too excited when I saw it.

Using motherboards with better inbuilt features.

Admittedly, it is the µATX motherboards that are more feature-rich, but many full ATX boards at least have builtin sound (some even digital), and if it is just VGA video output, some will have that too.

_________________
| Nigel Pearson, nigel.pearson.au@gmail.com
| "Things you own end up owning you" - Tyler, Fight Club

Hi,

Reading the fine print carefully, looks like it would take five cards and would only be standard def. From the link...
and if the screen shot is any indicator, they are just little windows.

If it sounds too good to be true.....
Mike

HDHomerun tuner (Ethernet attached) and on-board NVidia 6150 graphics.

One big advantage of Ethernet is that you can put the tuner
next to the antenna (good coax is expensive, and a good UHF amp
even more so), and then run network cable anywhere you want (no
signal degradation over the Ethernet link).

At the moment, the HDHR is ATSC/QAM only. There's a DVB version
in the works, but it isn't out yet...

_________________
Grant

I was facing this problem on the weekend. I found that Gigabyte still have motherboards with four PCI slots. I bought a GA-M52S-S3P, which has an nforce 430 chipset. The other problem was that most motherboards only have one IDE channel. I bought a SATA DVD burner to solve this.