First post, Just want to share our experience. We are huge XBMC fans and have been using it since the days of the OLD xbox one. Our home media consisted of 3xXBMC installs and A full subscription to a major sat provider with multiroom access.
Our initial plan was to get a decent dreambox or VU+ to replace the Sat receivers and stream from the lounge to the other rooms via XBMC. Unfortunately the cost of the decent receivers put us off, considering we had no experience with enigma2. So we opted for a cheap ass OPtibox EVO E3HD which set us back about 100 notes.
It's an OK box for the money and if all you need is a single tuner and to dip your toes into cardsharing etc then I'd recommend it. However if youre anything like us then you'll be getting rid quick sharp. The biggest problems were the fact that while it would stream SD fairly well. It couldnt cope with HD. Any streaming would render the gui on the box next to useless. Finally, Channel zapping through XBMC was also painfully slow.
While we were dicking around with the enigma box we also installed TVheadend to the NAS (a 12tb ubuntu server) and connected up a Sony playTV PS3 DVB-T card to it. It worked like a charm. The TVHeadend PVR addon for Openelec/XBMC was much quicker along with channel changes so we decided to look at adding a DVB-S2 card. After looking around a bit we chose the DVB-*** one.
The day it was due to arrive we misguidedly messed around with hooking up OSCAM to TVHeadend. Got it pretty much setup. The card arrived and to our horror we had overlooked the fact that our NAS mobo didnt have a frickin PCI-e slot. Schoolboy error, or what?
Still with me? Next we found another old PC and spent what seemed like an age trying to get a working stick of ubuntu server to install. when it did we epic-ally failed installing the card driver. We were about to give up when we remembered that openelec has TVHeadend service which installs a full copy of of the software. That and openelec also has the DVB*** driver pre-installed.
Literally 5 mins later Openelec was up and running a little later and TVheadend was muxing the first tuner. It's also worth noting that there is an install-able OSCAM service too. As it turned out we didn't need it. we were able to add our N-line directly to TVHeadend. Installing the frontend on the other openelec installs was as easy as entering the IP of the server.
Next was the EPG. TVheadend supports OpenTV epg's out of the box but it doesnt have any channel logos so we had to spend a good 4 hours linking them in from lyngsat. on the plus side the clients cache these so they arent calling them from the internets each time. TBH with the absence of premade bouquets and picons this step is the most time consuming.
Anything missing? well, timeshifting isnt all that clever and thats about it. Zapping is superfast. It records perfectly. we can stream two HD channels simultaneously to other devices. All my boxes are ticked.
Cost. just £75 for the card, if you have an old PC lying around like we did. And its not anything flash either. 1.86 Intel COre Duo with a gig of ram.
Any Questions then please ask away
