In early 2000s ADSL was an unreachable dream here, a myth. I
guess ze Germans were just starting
with SDSL/whatever and their old equipment was not yet available for
transfer to Croatia. I had to wait 19PM for
lower dial-up rates (also expensive mind you), and then spend
the whole night on-line (thank you for the
lovely sleep
disorder). Anyway, after reviewing my options only solution
was SatDSL. I signed up
with Netsystem, and as a part
of their service I received a PCI DVB-S card, it was
a SkyStar2 card from TechniSat. At the time I was
completely ignorant to all other benefits this beautiful piece of
hardware brings... well, not for long anyway.
Today I still have the same card in
a dedicated PC that is
running VDR for watching SAT TV. In the age of eye candy
and flashy things like "Boxee", "XBMC"
and "MythTV" it manages to stay remarkably simple (in design,
not necessarily in implementation) yet very powerful, it perfectly
fits the KISS philosophy of Slackware or Arch
that I learned to appreciate so much. Combined
with Oxine you get a full
blown media center without any complexities that solutions like
MythTV imply (SQL being one). But thanks to some smart design
choices VDR is infinitely
expandable via plugins, so it can still offer any functionality
other systems have. For example, using plugins it's possible to watch
analog TV as well as IPTV (and of
course DVB-C/T are natively supported) all from one
interface. Speaking of DVB it also has the upper hand over
MythTV as the latter was started with analog TV in
mind while VDR was built around DVB from ground
up. People in my country recognize VDR as a
premium STB solution, yet very few know their way around
GNU/Linux and VDR became kind of a myth that everyone
recommends yet no one uses (sticking to lesser Windows
alternatives). That bothered me as VDR is the simplest solution out
there, so a few years ago I wrote
a wiki
article guiding people trough each step of the process. I didn't
count all the thank-you notes I received since then but they
are close to a hundred now.
With this introduction concluded, in the future I can write about some
more interesting bits and pieces of the setup, like software CAM
emulation, streaming and so on...