Streaming HDTV from DVB-S2 USB tuner?

[marcelru]

Hi all,

I am kinda getting fed up with my cable provider and want to switch to satellite TV. I have a UE40B7020 CI, with analog/dvb-C tuner.

Does anyone know whether drop-in satellite tuner replacements are possible/available on our TV's, and in particular, mine?

or:

Would it be feasible to buy a USB DVB-S2 tuner (Linux compliant, v4l2 driver available) and stream HDTV from this tuner to the TV through USB, and control the tuner through Sammy's own remote, possibly via code injection into exeDSP? I hate to have a bunch of remotes floating around in my living room.

Any suggestions/remarks (including "what? are you crazy? or something along these lines) are welcome.

grtz,

marcelr

[nbd]

What? Are you crazy?

Getting the USB thing to work might need additional kernel modules and I think it's going to be hard to get the actual picture to the TV. If we knew more about the hardware, maybe the HDTV stream from USB could be sent to the proper hardware.

[marcelru]

I was more thinking along these lines:

1 Buy a linuxtv compatible USB DVB-S2 tuner/receiver (with or without smartcard reader). Terratec has some of these (S2 and S7 models).

2 Compile the driver and v4l(2) software layer for it.

3 Do the settings for the receiver through the TV, over USB, via some injected code.

4 Set the tuner/receiver to spit out a Samsung tv compatible videostream over USB.

5 Open a pipe for video data collection, from USB.

6 Readout the pipe as if it is a USB pendrive.

7 Play the video stream as if it is a movie on a pendrive

8 Live happily ever after.

The biggest problem probably lies in steps 4-6.

4: I'm not sure if a USB DVB-(C,S,T) receiver can do that.
5: If 4 fails, this will certainly NOT work.
6: Is the TV fast enough?

Any ideas, or am I talking nonsense?

marcelr

[erdem_ua]

After months, here is real brainstorming.
Enjoyed while reading.
Thanks marcelru.

[jw1001]

Didn't someone already convert to satellite just by replacing the main board?

http://forum.samygo.tv/viewtopic.php?t=355#p12160

[marcelru]

Hi, I'm getting back to you a little late, sourceforge twice refused to accept a post-reply from me last week, dunno what's wrong, but hopefully this time it's ok.

@erdem:

you are welcome.

ruhigundrelaxed,

Replacing the mainboard in my opinion is just a sign of weakness, the easy way out: I will do that if all else fails, and probably not even then: Might as well buy another TV.

About the software: My TV runs kernel 2.6.18 and that's probably the biggest problem to tackle (thanks arris69 for pointing this out). The kernel cannot be upgraded, because of the lack of the proprietary code for samdrv.ko. We cannot rebuild that module for other kernels, unless Samsung publishes the code for it, which they will not do, at least not on purpose . Without the module, the TV is no longer a TV .

DVB support for many hardware items starts somewhere around kernel version 2.6.23, or even later for newer hardware. That means that we have to backport some drivers and (part of) the v4l/dvb stack. I don't have that much experience in backporting, but I'm willing to give it a go. The amount of backporting to be done mainly is determined by the choice of hardware: The earlier it has been supported in the kernel, the better, less backporting needed.

The data handling is probably not the biggest issue. Just this morning I built a working environment for a PCTV pico stick 74e (borrowed from our sysop, he uses it to let our department watch football matches ) . With xine as viewer, on a 2003 dual processor 2.2GHz opteron system, the demuxing load on a single CPU is less than 5%. I know that an ARM is slower, but probably this is doable.

grtz,

marcelr