WinTV-NOVA-HD-S2

[Michael]

Hello all,

 

I recently installed a 60cm satellite dish and bought myself a Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-HD-S2.

 

This is easily the best piece of hardware I have bought in a long while! Easy to install, easy to setup and the visuals on BBC HD were superb. It's very well integrated with CyberLink's PowerCinema and is fully Freesat compatible. It's also great value for money at around £63.

 

The only bad thing about it is the drivers on the supplied CD didn't work as well as expected, but downloading the latest drivers soon fixed that.

 

Roll on more HD channels

[john]

Sounds good, keep meaning to get a quad or octo LNB end for my Dish and run a few more feeds around the house, I want to upgrade the front room to Sky+ and put Sky HD in my room now I have the HD TV, but as a stop gap that could be good.

 

I assume that the dish is alligned to the same as Sky as I had been told by a friend that has Freesat that he just used his old Sky dish that he had from when he paid Mr Murdoch lots of money for Sky Digital.

[Michael]

Yes 28.2 degrees to be precise. Most dishes will be fine, it's only a small minority which are not. As for LNB's, ebay is the place to look. I bought a quad LNB for £10. Octo are also available at very good prices.

 

I think my next project will be looking at using multiple LNB's on one dish I think Freesat will attract more people at the end year as they'll be a lot more channels. The BBC/ITV advertise there are 80 channels (which is true), but at the moment, some of them are just BBC 1, but in different regions. It's definitely not 80 completely different channels. As the service matures though it will be well worth getting.

[john]

Yeh it looks a really good idea, I will be looking more into it in the coming weeks and months. Wonder if you can record BBC1 HD under ERA for school use?

 

As for Quad and Octo ends, I'm a lucky guy got an ex-sky engineer friend and he's got boxes of bits left including a nice pile of LNBs but if he's run out by the time I can actually be bothered to do the work, I'll just eBay one, as you said plenty of them about.

[zag]

Does it have the Freesat EPG though?

 

What are the hardware requirements for BBCHD?

 

Also any idea how thick the card is? I would need to cram it into my small htpc

[mortstar]

Does it have the Freesat EPG though?

 

What are the hardware requirements for BBCHD?

 

Also any idea how thick the card is? I would need to cram it into my small htpc

 

xmltv ftw.

 

Or indeed an excellent HTPC like MEDIAPORTAL - free MediaCenter HTPC Software - Home even more win.

 

I have a BlackGold 6-in-1 card with 2x DVB-S inputs (I only use one until I get a dual LNB on the dish) and 2x DVB-T inputs. So I get the best of freesat (HD channels) and freeview (more channels) in one place and don't have to give the Dirty Digger any of my £££s. Also no pratting about with red button for ITV HD.

 

Hopefully stuff like five, Channel 4 HD, some of the UKTV selection and more will move over to freesat over time. The extra bandwidth and near 100% coverage of DVB-S make it the way forward for future non-subscription services in the UK.

[Michael]

Does it have the Freesat EPG though?

 

When I installed the drivers, (along with CyberLink's PowerCinema), it gave me the choice of obtaining program information either from the satellite, or through my broadband connection. I presume this is what you're referring to?

 

What are the hardware requirements for BBCHD

 

The hardware requirements are that of the card itself:

 

Minimum processor 3.2 GHz Intel® P4 or equivalent.

Microsoft Windows Vista (32 & 64bit) or XP (32bit only) with Service Pack 2.

Graphics with 64 MB of memory (minimum).

Sound card or on board sound.

A free PCI slot.

CD-ROM drive (for Software installation)

 

I run it on a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz, 2GB memory, Creative X-Fi, Nvidia 7800GTX and XP SP3.

 

Also any idea how thick the card is? I would need to cram it into my small htpc

 

Difficult to describe. It's definitely not low profile, but the card caused me no problems to install inbetween two other cards. The X-Fi and a PCI Firewire card I have installed.

 

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@mortstar - I only found that out about ITV HD. I don't understand why they've made it so you have to press Red. I believe Channel 5 and Dave (as well as others) will be joining Freesat in the Autumn, so not too far really. They'll be 200 channels by the end of 2008.

[mortstar]

@mortstar - I only found that out about ITV HD. I don't understand why they've made it so you have to press Red. I believe Channel 5 and Dave (as well as others) will be joining Freesat in the Autumn, so not too far really. They'll be 200 channels by the end of 2008.

 

They want to make it Freesat exclusive, to dig back at Sky, for how little it is worth. They showed all Euro 2008 on it (looked awesome) and since then only 1 movie!

 

You can tune in to ITV HD with a PC tuner - most HTPC software has it working (except Windows Media Centre as it is crap). I use MediaPortal, but I know it works on DVBViewer and plenty of others.