Re: MCE 2006 Wish List
From: Stephen Neal (stephen.neal_at_nospam.please.as-directed.com)
Date: 12/02/04
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Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 12:46:25 -0000
Nigel Barker wrote:
> All the radio stations on Sky digital satellite service via analogue
> capture card are also supported which is many more than on DVB-T.
Yep - and almost all of the radio channels available with a Sky Digital
service are FTA DVB-S (Talk Sport is the only one that springs to mind as
being encrypted these days, since FiveLive went FTA) - so if a BDA DVB-S
driver were supported in MCE 2005 we'd be able to use a Nova-S or similar
DVB-S card to receive them without an analogue link in the chain!
>
> DAB would be very nice but AFAIK there is no PCI or USB device
> available on the market at this time. There was the Psion Wavefinder
> but you can only find these on Ebay nowadays.
Yep - agreed and the Wavefinder is difficult to get running under XP (and
worse under SP2 I believe)
>
> The total lack of support for DVB-S & DVB-C is a glaring omission too
> because with the standard CAM module for these services even
> encrypted services can be supported including HDTV for Euro1080.
Couldn't agree more. The lack of support for these transmission systems
(especially with suitable CAM support) must surely be a major limitation for
their take-up in Continental Europe (where CI CAMs are available for Pay-TV
services) The concept of an external set top box being driven by an IR
blaster, and feeding PAL composite or S-video to a further MPEG2 encoder is
hardly going to appeal to anyone who likes high quality video - especially
when RGB analogue video interconnects (and the picture quality they deliver)
are expected as pretty basic minimum requirements for digital TV in Europe.
(I haven't watched TV at home through a PAL or S-video connection since
1998 - don't see why moving to XP MCE means I should start again now - which
is why I use a DVB-T card)
Sadly the analogue and US-centric approach means that MCE is maddeningly not
quite there. The UI is clean and simple, and friendly, and the picture
quality for replay is pretty good in some cases. However the support for
modern digital TV is really poor, and the system is still not in Tivo's
league for reliability. I have installed very little on my MCE 2005 install
apart from drivers (Motherboard, ATI video card, Soundblaster 2NX, NVidia
DVD, Nova-T, PVR 350 - which is now de-installed) , an antivirus programme,
and the FFDShow codecs. I still get system lock-ups, freezes and the odd
BSOD during most viewing sessions that run for longer than an hour or two -
ending up with a Windows Error report in many cases. My Tivo has crashed
about 3 times in 2 years - and that was always when I was hacking it.
>You
> just put your normal satellite card in the card slot. This is
> supported in Showshifter & other applications. The use of DVB-S with
> standard CAM is very widespread throughout Europe it's only the UK
> that is out of step with the proprietary Sky digibox.
Yep - though the security of these systems is far lower it seems as a result
(with hacking schemes available for many of them apparently). Isn't Mr
Murdoch trying to move Sky Italia to MediaGuard (and a non-CI CAM solution)
eventually - though it is multicrypting at the moment I believe?
Sky may be proprietary - but it IS proving to be pretty secure against
widespread hacking.
Steve
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