800HD PVR and DVB-S2 tuner

[tatsujin]

Hi all, first post here!

I've installed a Sundtek USB DVB-S2 tuner to my DM (it's OpenPLi)
It works, but not as nice as I'd like.

I have a few annoyances I'd like to ask you peeps about:

1. The box does not boot completely by itself. It appears that /usr/sundtek/sun_dvb.sh start_s2 never complets and blocks the boot sequence. If I kill that process it completes the start up (and I have to run the script afterwards, or run Sundtek Control Center). I've not dug into it to determine why this script never finishes.

2. Switching channels takes about 4-6 seconds. Sometimes even the spinning gears appear, if only for a short while.

3. Watching HD channels (both 720p and 1080p) lags the box horribly. Current avg.load is ~2.8, which to my understanding is quite a lot. It might be memory related, but I can also see that the mediasrv process uses about 50% CPU.
Sometimes event the picture can freeze up, indefinitely (until channel switch).

What are other peoples experience using the Sundtek tuner on a dreambox?

[Sundtek]

The DM800HD (not the DM800HD SE) is a quite low performance settopbox, the bottleneck is copying data the cpu does a horrible job on copying a single byte.
 
If it hangs there's a hardware issue on your box, try to change the USB Port.
Some more detailed debugging:
Try enabling logging in /etc/sundtek.conf (either delete the loglevel line or add loglevel=min)
Afterwards check /var/log/mediasrv.log

In the sundtek control center, enable dm800hd acceleration.

Use an SDTV Skin.

Don't record TV to a USB flash device.

The tuner just works with that settopbox, but since the performance is so slow you can't really expect it to fly to the moon, newer settopboxes don't have those performance issues.

[tatsujin]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Yeah, I kind of guessed that the box would not be up to snuff...

Hm, I don't recall there being an acceleration option in the Control Center. I have, however, enabled the vtuner_acceleration option in the config file. I did not see any noticable improvement though .

About the logging, what can I expect to find there?

Another detail I forgot to mention. When the picture freezes the tuner is spitting out data just fine, I can start a recording (during the freeze!) and the recorded clip is fine. So it seems the problem is only related to displaying the picture. Which is kind of weird.

But anyway, the box is end of life and supports only 720p (and 1080i, but that's crap), so it's only a matter of time before it will be replaced anyway...

[Sundtek]

The tunerhandling is optimized as far as it can be optimized (even dream multimedia added some specials there which we are using to minimize the data-copying part). Of course it also depends which channels you are going to use, from our tests we can only say SDTV is okay but HDTV is not recommended with one of the biggest german cable providers with the DM800HD (again not DM800HD SE).

The logfile shows up if there's any problem with USB.

[tatsujin]

Ok.

I'm already looking around for another "box" setup...

Thanks again.