Can I use my PC as a Sky decoder?

[pmc]

I am planning on buying a media centre PC to become my single hub for all AV. So it will replace my CD player/PVR/DVD recorder. One thing I thought would be cool is if could also replace my Sky Digibox. What I mean is that I want to connect the satellite dish directly to the PC, do the decoding on the PC, and output to the TV. Does anyone know if this is possible?

I should emphasise that I am NOT talking about hacking Sky here. I am quite happy to pay for Sky and would presume I would need some sort of card reader to connect to the PC for the Sky card.

[Nick_UK]

What you are asking for is a satellite receiver card for a PC which has a "conditional access module" (CAM) for Sky. Unfortunately these things don't exist because Sky don't grant licences for anything other than Sky and Sky+ boxes.

[Cyril]

This is one of my pet hates.

Sadly the UK government won't legislate on open Sky CAM agreements.

So Sky have no incentive to offer any licenses anytime in the near future.

With Murdoch in charge I think we might have to wait until he quits control of Sky before allowing anyone else to have a CAM.

You can sort of get round this by using SDI to get a pure digital output from the Sky Box to your PC if you have a spare £1500 lying around. But you will still need your Sky box!


You can of course view unencrypted Sky channels with a PCI satellite card
http://www.radioandtelly.co.uk/onyourpc.html

[dogtanian38]

Hi

You can obtain a skystar2 or similar PCI bus sky reciever card with a CI (common interface) slot. The CI slot can take any form of industry standard CAM (conditional access module) for instance the Dragon CAM or otherwise. Pick your CAM based on what type of smartcard you need to read.

The dragon cam suggested can emulate the NDS system used by sky digiboxes, thus the sky smartcard thinks it is in one, and you can then watch all the channels you get on your digibox on your PC.

Please note two important points:

sky's encryption has not been broken - you do need a valid sky smartcard.

NDS can change the software used to read the cards at any time, and the makers of the Dragon CAM have not undertaken to chase NDS updates.

[Nick_UK]

Sky use a very simple encryption method at the moment, because that's all they need to use, but they can "ramp it up" at any time they want. The NDS system relies on a static key (which is what Sky use at the moment), and Sky could change this to two keys per second at any time, endering NDS a heap of useless junk.

[David PluggedIn]

You can sort of get round this by using SDI to get a pure digital output from the Sky Box to your PC if you have a spare £1500 lying around. But you will still need your Sky box!

its actually a *lot* cheaper than that

if you dont mind a graded unit then you can get an entire PC setup (SDI modified Sky+ box and PC card for less than £500)

regards

[Cyril]

Originally Posted by David PluggedIn

its actually a *lot* cheaper than that

if you dont mind a graded unit then you can get an entire PC setup (SDI modified Sky+ box and PC card for less than £500)

regards

Cool!

Any deal on a Sky+ SDI, PC Card and SDI TiVo mod?

[dogtanian38]

Originally Posted by David PluggedIn

its actually a *lot* cheaper than that

if you dont mind a graded unit then you can get an entire PC setup (SDI modified Sky+ box and PC card for less than £500)

regards

It's even cheaper than that with a few google searches - I'm sure you can get cheaper if you shop around:

skystar with CI: £119

http://www.sateuropa.co.uk/overview....tid=1&subcat=7

Dragon CAM: £59

http://www.dreamboxshop.co.uk/

I see a lot of you guys are power members etc suggesting the SDI modded sky+ box, but I cannot see any advantage in this route, especially as its 3 times the price. Surely sky can kill modified boxes just as easily, plus its going to be a lot more complicated with an external box.

[David PluggedIn]

I see a lot of you guys are power members etc suggesting the SDI modded sky+ box, but I cannot see any advantage in this route, especially as its 3 times the price. Surely sky can kill modified boxes just as easily, plus its going to be a lot more complicated with an external box.

The SDI route is a completely different approach to using PC sat cards and emulators.
The Sky SDI boxes that we provide are completely standard, but with an extra board fitted that intercepts the digital video prior to conversion to analogue video.

It is therefore designed purely as a means of getting a perfect image, rather than a mechanism to avoid purchasing a Sky box. Of course, being a standard Sky+ box, you get all the normal Sky+ features such as dual record, live pause etc.
As pointed out, the external Dragon cam route could stop working at any time - that doesnt apply to SDI Sky boxes.

Cyril, you mentioned Tivo SDI mods, we dont do those - and realistically as has been pointed out, once the video has gone through a D->A-A->D conversion cycle to get it in to Tivo, then it gets compressed to record on to Tivo, the benefits of a pure digital feed out of Tivo at that point are marginal as a large amount of picture information has already been lost.

[philipb]

As one of David's customers, I can testify that SDI modded Sky+ is well worth the cash. I currently feed it into a Cinemateq scaler, but have fed it into a HTPC using Plugged-in's SDI PCI cards. PQ is fantastic. As David points out it cannot be killed by Sky, and it is worth remembering that the digital feed comes off the box before anything is done to the signal - D to a conversion and.....

There are loads of software packages that will wrok with the SDI card so that you can use your PC as a PVR. It would be really good if Plugged-in would issue BDA drivers to make the card MCE2005 friendly. Any chance David?

[David PluggedIn]

Hi Phil

thanks for the review
There is more on the Sky SDI boxes in this month's HCC magazine.
regarding BDA drivers, then no plans at the moment, MediaPortal gives a very near MCE experience and supports the existing drivers.

We are looking at Linux though

cheers

[MarkHudds]

David

I'm, along with probably a lot of customers, very disappointed regarding your statement on having no plans to release BDA drivers for the Sweetspot cards.

The majority of people will always go for the easiest/stable solution for front-end, and at the moment that has to be MCE2005. MediaPortal, Meedio etc are just to difficult to configure and maintain. I agree there will be those who prefer the 'tinkering' aspect, although the 'it just works' advantage of MCE2005 is a clear winner for me and my family.

Having used a Sky+ box (non SDI) connected to a Sweetspot card (RGB) with Dscaler, there was no way I could accept the drop in quality going to a hardware MPEG2 Tuner card in MCE2005 (tried NVTV, ATI and Hauppauge). I'm therefore stuck with using Sweetspot outside of the MCE2005 UI - a very frustrating user experience.

Not being a developer, I couldn't possibly take a guess at how much investment would be required to build the required BDA drivers, however does it not concern you how many potential customers you might be losing by not offering this facility? After all a RGB/Component capture card with MCE2005 compatibilty would be unique in the marketplace!

Please, please re-consider.

[David PluggedIn]

Hi Mark

Thanks for your thoughts , many good points, in particular how grim the mpeg2 cards look.. consider us to now be reconsidering !

cheers

[philipb]

Mark beat me to it. i was going to post that having tried all the alternatives inc Showshifter, MCE 2005 beats them all. Sometimes Windows really is the best.

I would guess that MCE2005 compatible Sweetspot cards - digital and analogue - would go down a storm.

[Bluestraw]

Originally Posted by MarkHudds

Having used a Sky+ box (non SDI) connected to a Sweetspot card (RGB) with Dscaler, there was no way I could accept the drop in quality going to a hardware MPEG2 Tuner card in MCE2005 (tried NVTV, ATI and Hauppauge). I'm therefore stuck with using Sweetspot outside of the MCE2005 UI - a very frustrating user experience.

I'm new to this, so sorry if this is bad question!...

Are you saying that the quality you get via Sweetspot card, using RGB output from Sky+ box, is vastly superior to the quality when passing to any other card, e.g. via S-Video input? I am planning a similar set-up, and I was thinking to convert RGB >- S-Video and then input that to HTPC, but maybe that's bad??