differences between DVB-c/s/t

[Doom9]

I don't have cable and there's no terrestrial DVB broadcast in my area so I'd like to know if anybody who has access to multiple DVB formats could tell me something about their differences. Specifically, what are the differences in capturing that content (digitally of course), and is the captured format any different from what you get from DVB-s?

[bb]

I have DVB-c only, but as far as I know the only difference is in the receivers on the DVB cards. Of course there may be differences in bitrate or resolution, if you look at the corresponding channels transmitted over the three ways. But these differences apply to any single DVB flavour, too, if you look at the different channels.

I'm tempted to say if you know how to get any of the three flavours onto DVD, you know them all.

You have to take care of certain extravagances, though. E.g. for DVB-s you have to deal with DiSEq, whereas DVB-c just ignores these settings. For DVB-t you probably have some issues with positioning the antenna.

bb

[Doom9]

do you know of any differences wrt to viewing applications? Like.. if I buy the -c or -t version of my card from Technisat, do I need different software for watching TV (and more importantly: capturing the digital streams)?

[stax76]

there are quite a few SkyStar 1 programs that support cable and sat and in the future (maybe already) also terrestric. Imho SkyStar 1 is not worth the big price, deinterlacing and TV out have huge limitations. Also the popular applications don't impress me except the free DVBControl. Pretty much all of this progs are MFC based (the SDK is MFC based), needless to say all the Delphi programs like SkyViev, DVBViewer, MyTheatre etc. evolve a lot faster. It's a very old card, for many years there weren't really alternatives to this card. I don't know much about budget cards because I've got mine not much longer than you your's, before that I had a long time no DVB. I'm quite happy with the SkyStar 2 so far

[unixfs]

Doom9,
the captured content is the same: originally it's Mpeg-TS, but
for interoperability with editing applications it's almost always remuxed and saved as Mpeg-PS,
whatever the transmission medium used.

There's at least one program for windows (but I don't remember which one) that can save as Divx/Xvid.

[MrDarcy]

Originally posted by bb
I'm tempted to say if you know how to get any of the three flavours onto DVD, you know them all.


I think so, too. AFAIK the only differences between DVB-S -T and -C are in the signal modulation (QPSK, COFDM, QAM ) and not in the MPEG encoding step.
At the moment, here we have only DVB-S but by the end of this year we should have DVB-T.

[ronnylov]

Originally posted by Doom9
do you know of any differences wrt to viewing applications? Like.. if I buy the -c or -t version of my card from Technisat, do I need different software for watching TV (and more importantly: capturing the digital streams)?

I have a Technotrend DVB-C 2.1 which is similar to the Skystar1 DVB-S card. One thing that is a little bit tricky with the applications is that most of them are made for satellite reception and scanning the channels may be difficult. Sometimes you need to edit a ini file or scan the channels in another application and import the channel list. Like in DVBControl that I use mostly, I had to scan the channels with multidec, then use a channel list editor to convert to a format that could be imported into DVBControl because the channel search within this application did not work. I think I also had to edit the channel list file manually also. But some software like ProgDVB and DVBXtreme can scan the channels without problems.

But once everything is set up the applications seems to work in the same way as if I was using a skystar1 DVB-S card.