Best Combination of HW/SW for Optimal Performance of DD?

[kschaef65]

I have been working with the software for a bout a week and I am totally intrigued. I have a TwinHan 102G card, common Intel P4 2.8 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 300 gig ATA hard drive, GeForce 5500 AGP. Using the latest DD, the latest vpl**.

I have been working through one problem after another that seem to cause lockups. This happens particularly when trying to start more than one program in picture-in-picture windows.

My major questions is this:

If you are one of those people that has the screenshots of 4 channels being tuned in at the same time. Could you please post your hardware configuration and what versions of DD, softcam, and codecs you are using?

I am wondering if I am having performance problems if I should be looking into anything other than my hardware and appropriate drivers. For the first time today I saw the picture-in-picture work only after I installed and changed to the Dscaler MPEG decoder.

Can someone tell their recommendation of hardware generally? Does a higher end NVIDIA card with PureVideo allow me to truly enjoy the multitasking picture-in-picture?

What DVB card works the smoothest? I seem to read a lot about SkyStar2.

I would like to know because I would be perfectly willing to pay for such cool software but I would like for it to be running optimally. It would be cool if the EPG and the recording function were reliable also. I would be perfectly willing to buy more hardware and licensed software to create a box that works great. ("willing to pay" includes paying for DD)

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[FredB]

If you are one of those people that has the screenshots of 4 channels being tuned in at the same time. Could you please post your hardware configuration and what versions of DD, softcam, and codecs you are using?

Are you talking about that : http://www.dvbdream.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3216#3216 ?

This screenshot was taken on my PC equiped with Ahtlon XP 3200+, 1024 Mo DDR (Dual Channel), GeForce 6600 GT and a Pinnacle PCTV Sat (old version). Codecs in use are nVidia PureVideo, and I use a Phoenix SmartCard reader handle by a NewCS server to get informations from my official CSat France subscription card. Those infos are handled by DD via WinCSC plugin.

What DVB card works the smoothest? I seem to read a lot about SkyStar2.

SS2 is a cheap and reliable solution for DVB-S reception on PC, so this card is very frequently encountered. On my own, I have three different cards : a Pinnacle PCTV Sat, a Twinhan DTV-CI (VP 1030A) and a Terratec Cinergy 1200 DVB-S (TT Budget Clone).

The first card I bought was the Pinnacle's one, it's a very reliable card but does not have BDA drivers. (Be careful about Pinnacle products, technical support about them is the worst I ever seen.)

Then I bought the Twinhan's one, this card works fine with BDA or WDM drivers, but the CI is not correctly handled by BDA drivers and new Aston CAMs are not supported. It also appears that this card is very sensitive to signal interferences.

The third one is the Terratec Cinergy 1200 DVB-S. This one (wich is a clone from TT Budget cards) is very reliable and runs better than the Twinhan's one.

[kschaef65]

Thank you for responding to my post. I tried working with different codecs but really did not have much luck. It seems as though it got a little better when I switched from Intervideo for my video codec but I still had frequent crashes and there was no way I can get 2 or more picture-in-picture windows to play for any period of time. However, I found a solution. I was using vp** and I switched to emun** and all of my problems went away. It now plays many channels very smoothly.

However, now I am on to my next challenge. It seems that the Twinhan BDA drivers will not receive high-definition programming. Will the Twinhan do it if I use the direct (non-BDA) Twinhan drivers? Is there any other way around this limitation or is it that the hardware simply cannot support the Turbo/8SPK modulation.

Does the SkyStar2 support high-definition receiving?

[FredB]

Most of HD channels are transmitted via DVB-S2 protocol wich allows 8PSK and Turbo PSK, so you have to use a DVB-S2 compliant card to receive such channels.

Your Twinhan card is a DVB-S card wich is only compatible with QPSK stream.

Examples of DVB-S2 card : Technotrend S2-3200, Technotrend S2-3600, Technisat Skystar HD, TwinhanDTV DVB-S2 CI, KNCOne TV-Station DVB-S2...