DVBSky 952

[RedDwarf]

I am looking for some opinions on the Dual tuner DVBSky S952 PCI-e cards. I am interested in purchasing one to replace a Dual Mystique DVB-S2 card which corrupts the transport streams when dual tuners are used.

 

Do they work well? Do the dual tuners record okay?

 

Error/quality and signal level reporting how well does this work? Do the results reflect the actual reception quality?

 

How is the reception quality? Does it lock the signal well and pick up weak channels?

 

Reliability, is everything okay?

 

I did see one German forum post which, after google translate, indicated that the owner did have some problems.

 

DVBViewer Hardware post

Edited August 19, 2012 by RedDwarf

[LocalHolgi]

If you have enough space to add an additional card it might be a good idea just to add another adapter into your machine. If there is not enough space and you have a plenty of euro to spent you should give one of those digital devices adapters a try. They are pretty expensive, but have excellent drivers and work extremely well within the DVBViewer. Some sort of Porsche under those DVB devices

[RedDwarf]

Thanks for your reply, however I won't buy another digital devices card after my last experience of them. The Mystique card is based upon a digital devices card and it doesn't work in my PC. The quality reporting is also poor, showing 100% quality for anything over about 70%. The quality reporting is not linear like it should be, up to 70% it is linear but over 70% it reports only 100%.

 

The Mystique (digital devices) card would not work and they refused to replace it saying it was just incompatible with my PC. It corrupts recordings when more than one tuner is used. Very poorly designed in my opinion. The first card I received also had corruption problems and they said that was due to a design problem with early cards, although they claimed it only affected a few cards. The one they replaced it with still caused corruption and yet they refused to replace that claiming it was due to my PC and not their card.

 

Never again! I would not recommend them to anyone.

 

Therefore I need a card that actually works, which is why I wanted to know about the DVBSky card. It is supposed to use a new tuner IC and I was hoping it had a sensitive tuner and that the drivers provided reliable quality and signal level reporting. I only had that for a short time with the Mystique card, until they changed the drivers and started reporting >70% signal quality as 100%. Even DVBViewer has had to be altered because of this. It now only shows the signal level rather than the quality because of the way the drivers report the signal quality.

[RedDwarf]

This is about the best I have found for functionality of the DVBSky S952 card. It's in German so deciphering the google translation is not great. There seem some problems but from what I can make out, could be due to at least one faulty card. I might just get one and try it, if it's crap it can go straight back. I will see how it compares with the Mystique card by digital devices.

[CrazyCat69]

what fault Mystique DVB-S2 Dual ? old revision Mystique SaTiX-S2 Dual V2 ? Look like this replaced with new V3 revision - some new mediabridge and new revision demod STV0900BAC.

 

DVBSky S952 also available as Mystique SaTiX-S2 Sky Xpress DUAL - 100% same device with same PCI id.

 

And i think this good and reliable low-cost dual-tuner device. Good drivers and 100% compatible with 3dparty soft. Used new Montage DS3103 demod, sensitivity better comparing with old DS300x (DVBSky S8x0, TeVii). But you must understand - most dual-tuner device have some limitations for maximal stream bitrate (2xserial transport stream bus btw demom and media-bridge), for S952 this ~70mbit (27500,8PSK,5/6 = ~67mbit). So if you need higher bitrates need use 2x device.

Edited August 22, 2012 by CrazyCat69

[RedDwarf]

Thanks CrazyCat69 for the reply. My Mystique card is a V1 and it requires a daughter board to enable the CI module and I received it just after it was released in Dec 2009. There were so many hardware errors and reports of incompatibility on the forums that they revised the digital devices cards, which the Mystique is based on, about 6 times. The Mystique card was only updated 3 times.

 

The bitrate isn't that big a problem because the highest bitrate that gets used on FreeSat is about 17Mbit and that's a peak, the average is more like 7 Mbit.

 

There aren't many other affordable choices when it comes to dual tuner Satellite cards so I might have to give it a try. The only real alternatives are the TBS cards and Blackgold but the Blackgold are very expensive.

[mosborne]

Hi:

I have a DVBSKY Dual Express S2. I have been working on getting it installed for the last 2 months. This is not totally due to the card. The card seems to be working ok. I have it in a PC with i3 pentium, 8gb ram, 1.3Tb HD. I am using a ASROCK Z77 series mb. I am usng the onboard video option and I also have a Fusionhdtv7 video card. I am running multiboot with Windows 8, Windows 7 and Ubuntu/Mythbuntu 12.10. I am using a 1m dish on a STAB H-120 motor for FTA reception. My backup is a Openbox S9 Sat receiver. So most of my time has been trying to get everything working together.

 

Like the gentlemen mentioned earlier, I also understand it to be the same as the Mystique, although my particualar model has a slightly different power adapter (std vs mini). The remote looks to be on the cheap side, although I believe there are two remotes available for this card.

 

I am still working with it, so I can not give you details on performance. Just got DVBViewer a couple of days ago. I have everything installed under Windows 7 Ultimate at the present. I will later install under Mythbuntu. I need to wait for FusionHDTV7 Windowss 8 drivers to be developed before I install them there.

 

I am in the US and stations seem to be coming in ok. I am also learning how to use DVBViewer so that is slowing me down. I am having a problem getting the remote for DVBSKY working. I downloaded the remote file from the member section, but not sure where all the components go since there was no instructions, so I shotgun them to various folders. But still my remote does not work. I welcome any suggestions on how to fix it.

 

As for buying the card, If, I think it is very good for the price. It was expemsive for me because of international shipping. I looked over several other cards I could get in the US and this one seemed the most advanced.

 

I'll let you know what I find out as I continue my project.

Thanks

[RedDwarf]

Hi:

I have a DVBSKY Dual Express S2. I have been working on getting it installed for the last 2 months. This is not totally due to the card. The card seems to be working ok. I have it in a PC with i3 pentium, 8gb ram, 1.3Tb HD. I am using a ASROCK Z77 series mb. I am usng the onboard video option and I also have a Fusionhdtv7 video card. I am running multiboot with Windows 8, Windows 7 and Ubuntu/Mythbuntu 12.10. I am using a 1m dish on a STAB H-120 motor for FTA reception. My backup is a Openbox S9 Sat receiver. So most of my time has been trying to get everything working together.

 

Like the gentlemen mentioned earlier, I also understand it to be the same as the Mystique, although my particualar model has a slightly different power adapter (std vs mini). The remote looks to be on the cheap side, although I believe there are two remotes available for this card.

 

I am still working with it, so I can not give you details on performance. Just got DVBViewer a couple of days ago. I have everything installed under Windows 7 Ultimate at the present. I will later install under Mythbuntu. I need to wait for FusionHDTV7 Windowss 8 drivers to be developed before I install them there.

I've not been paying attention to this for some months and therefore I missed your post. I have not yet found a replacement card.

You should be okay with DVBViewer with regard to getting your setup working well because it does offer good support for multi satellite systems.

 

I am in the US and stations seem to be coming in ok. I am also learning how to use DVBViewer so that is slowing me down. I am having a problem getting the remote for DVBSKY working. I downloaded the remote file from the member section, but not sure where all the components go since there was no instructions, so I shotgun them to various folders. But still my remote does not work. I welcome any suggestions on how to fix it.

 

As for buying the card, If, I think it is very good for the price. It was expemsive for me because of international shipping. I looked over several other cards I could get in the US and this one seemed the most advanced.

 

I'll let you know what I find out as I continue my project.

Thanks

I believe that once you have put the dll into the Plugins folder and the database.remote file into the Remotes folder you need to activate the plugin in the Options Input->InputPlugins. Then see the Options Input page below to see how to assign the buttons. Once you have it setup how you like it, find out how to save the setup. I would be interested in your experiences with the card, especially for any channels/satellites that you know to provide weak signal levels.

DVBViewer Wiki

DVBViewer Wiki Options Input

DVBViewer Wiki Inputplugins

[mosborne]

Thanks RedDrawf:

 

I finally got it working. It turned out to be that my wireless keyboard/mouse was interferring with the remote configuration. Specifically, if I left the mouse pointer in the context of the remote setup screen, the software could not consistently determine if it was receiving a command from the remote or the keyboard. Once I moved the mouse pointer to the side (out of program window), the remote was detected.

 

WRT Signal Quality - I have a 1 meter dish on a STAB HH120 motor. Originally, I was using an OPENBOX S9 receiver for satellite reception of FTA stations. Using the auto scan feature, I could pull in more stations than I could ever watch (although most were of other nationalities). I had some weak signals, but for now I attribute that to the long cable run from the dish to the receiver. So I use the OPENBOX as my standardj for comparison.

 

The DVBSKY S2 appears to pull in the same stations as the OPENBOX with the same quality, however, I have now added a pre-amp to the system, so signal quality should be better regardless of receiver I am using. As best I can tell, DVBViewer does not have an autoscan feature. Maybe this will be added in some future upgrade. So for now I have to pick the satellite manually and scan until the software gets the batch scan feature. I get just as many stations on the DVBSKY S2 as I do the OPENBOX. As for weak signals - my first cut on that would be to check my dish alignment and wiring. Next I would suspect my software and last look at the DVBSKY card. This might be different if I had a fixed dish, but with the moveable there are more things that I have to check. I also have to say that so far my OPENBOX S9 is still the better receiver all around.

 

So I can't say I really have a weak signal problem that I can attribute to the card. If anything I would say the problems I have lie in the drivers to the card and the software frontends. For example, I have another TV card working under both Windows 7, 8 and Mythbuntu. I do not get the same stations between the Windows and the Linux based systems. Sadly to say, Windows does a better job so far, but that is probably partly because I am new to Ubuntu and have not figured out how to configure the drivers to optimum.

 

I though I did a good job looking over the various cards to pick out the best one for me. I can not say that I fully met that, the jury is still out on whether or not driver updates will continue to be developed. I think I should have investigated the drivers behind the card and frequency of updates provided. I suspect that a company that keeps up with driver development and has organic software development and support will be the best choice.

 

Thanks again.