How to create a PC-based DVB-S2 satellite receiver and home theater? In the following weeks I will be building a new HTPC from scratch, using inexpensive and available hardware. During that time you may be interested in coming back often, to check on the progress. Eventually you’ll be able to build a perfect “do it yourself HTPC”. You can subscribe to this articles.

There are many ways to get our HTPC working. What we need is a stable motherboard, a reasonable fast processor, a video card (eventually onboard) that supports hardware h.264 video acceleration, some memory and last but not least a DVB-S2 PCI satellite receiver.

One of the most important features of our setup is the accelerated video. The hardware (video card) must be able to decode the high definition video from the receiver. Typically DVB cards are nothing more that satellite tuners on a PCI board, capturing the radiowaves (microwaves) coming from the satellite dish and extracting the digital streams that are contained in them. For standard definition satellite (DVB-S1) that is MPEG-2, for High definition (DVB-S2) that is H.264. Decoding those streams (specially H.264 HD) is a time and resource consuming business. Most DVB cards don’t have the necessary hardware to perform this heavy task, so they blatantly dump the entire datastream onto the PCI bus, leaving the CPU with the burden of decoding it to video. You’ll need at least a dual core 2ghz+ to get uninterrupted video if you left it like that. Luckily for us, many video card manufactures saw this coming and integrated custom made and powerful hardware on their cards. This hardware takes over from the CPU, freeing it to do other tasks, like recording, zapping, etc.

H.264 is also known as the Advanced Video Codec (AVC) specification or MPEG-4 Part 10. It is one of the digital video codecs specified for the Blu-ray (BD) and High Definition DVD (HD DVD) formats. H.264 delivers two to three times the compression efficiency of the MPEG-2 standard, which is used to create current DVD videos and DVB-S1. It uses a lot more resources than MPEG-2 did.

Later I will investigate the mortherboards, video cards and DVBS2 PCI receivers suitable for this project. I will also be looking at the operating system and TV software.

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