I am looking for a card to DVB-T ing my current KM setup. I live in Denmark so i am in PAL world. Which is the best DVB-T card to use in my existing KM setup.

The current setup is MBE with a PVR500 card ind the basement, a SBE with a PVR350 card with TV-out connected to the livingroom tv and 2 FE's on old portables running Ubuntu 7.04.

I prefer that the card can run both the MPEG2 and the MPEG4 version of DVB-T as the Danish authorities has decided that by the end of 2008 the internal format of the DVB-t stream should shift from the present MPEG2 to MPEG4 to allow for more DVB channels.

Has any one tried a good DVB-T card with onboard decomprocessor that I should look to buy. If you have how do you get the existing KM MBE to recognize the card and load the accompagnying drivers?

/JK

Which cards support MPEG4 is hard to say. The "HD Ready" labels don't necessarily mean MPEG4. Since there aren't that many MPEG4 broadcasts yet, it is hard to find cards that people have working.

If your system can handle it, you might consider getting a simple card without decoding. It has a much higher chance of working with MPEG4 since the card doesn't do anything with the stream content. You may need to search the forums on H.264 to find the codecs. The cards are also dirt cheap. I got mine new for 25Euro on ebay.

The hard part is knowing if you have a strong enough signal. From the roof, I can almost see the antennas on Säntis (Swiss) and Pfänder (Austrian). However my roof antennas are pointed towards München and Ulm which are too far away, so I don't receive anything at the moment.

There is lot's of good info (including supported card lists) on http://www.linuxtv.org

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ASUS AT3N7A-I (Atom 330)
TBS 8922 PCI (DVB-S2)

Hi JK,

Dont know about mp4 broadcast stuff, but the KRP for the PAL world so far is my machine, the Australian Dragon. It uses the German Technisat airstar2 cards, so I'd imagine this would be a good place for you to start looking.

It does mpeg2 in sd and hd extremely competently and has rf pass-through. It's quite cheap, too. If you do get one, throw the remote control away - it doesn't easily work with Linux.

Regards

Mike

P.S. Specs on my system are open, if you want to have a look http://www.better-access.com/index.php?dest=specs

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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Don't know how it copes with mpeg4, but for today I can recommend Hauppauge NovaT-PCI (not NovaT-500!). I understand it has very little in terms of hardware assistance, yet, recording on all three and watching something else is a breeze in my quite old machine. This is one of the real strengths of KnoppMyth!
These cards are easy to set up and the remotes can be made to work, not quite standard procedure, but the information is here someplace.

Cheers,
/Chris

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LinHES R8.6.1
BE: AMD64X4, 4GB, Hauppauge usb tuners
FE1: Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4, nVidia GT640
FE2: Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H, AthlonX2 4850E 2.5 GHz, 1GB, ASUS GEFORCE 7200GS 256MB
FE3: Asus Eeebox410

Oh! Just got a reply from Hauppauge in response to my question if it's really HDTV I'm receiving with the Nova-T:s. They say that they think all Nova and HVR products work with mpeg4 (I didn't know that HDTV=mpeg4 although it makes sense...) with the proper software and will verify shortly.

Cheers,
/Chris

_________________
LinHES R8.6.1
BE: AMD64X4, 4GB, Hauppauge usb tuners
FE1: Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4, nVidia GT640
FE2: Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H, AthlonX2 4850E 2.5 GHz, 1GB, ASUS GEFORCE 7200GS 256MB
FE3: Asus Eeebox410

Thank you for your replies.

Neither DVB-T nor HDtv demands MPEG 4. Both could work with MPEG2 streams. MPEG4 is choosen because due to the greater compression under MPEG4 each cannel takes up less space. Since space is the primary limitation with respect to channel capacity in DVB-T it was decided to use MPEG4 indstead of the present MPEG2 compression algorithm in Danish DVB-T

Still haven't decided which card to use. Have any of you DVB-T PAL users worked with teletext/sub text under DVB-T? There is a couple of standards that i apparently has to make sure that my DVB-T card can suppoort/use:
MHP
NorDig
DVB-SI
OAD
I think the idea of having a card with software based decoder is good but how much would it tax the CPU on the backend decoding live streams of MPEG4 based DVB-t HDtv. My MBE is a 2.8 Ghz P4.

I use the MBE as a file server and music server for my Sonos musicsystem at the same time as being the center of my KM setup. I have noticed that sometimes when listening to music i get a few dropouts but i havent seen any serious load of the CPU when running top from the command line or looking at the new RRD tool.

What i noticed was that 48 hours after boot the server cachemem is released to freemem suddently.
Cachemem goes from approx 60% to under 10% while freemem goes from approx 2% to 40-50%.
I have dig into this to find out if it is Km or the normal behavior of linux/debian.
/jk