My 1080p HTPC: Freesat with Vista

Having ditched Freeview for signal quality reasons, it’s time to talk about getting the satellite cards to work under Vista Media Centre – something that until MS release the “Fuji” update is not as trivial as you’d think!  Vista’s tuning architecture doesn’t understand DVB-S (or -S2), so can’t natively tune satellite cards, so we need to “trick” Vista into believing that the satellite card is actually just a standard DVB-T (Freeview) card, albeit with many more channels.

Hauppauge’s WinTV-NOVA-HD-S2 card is a Freesat compatible, HDTV capable satellite card. Hauppauge themselves provide (local mirror) a modification to the Windows driver that fools Vista into seeing a DVB-T card instead of DVB-S.  It’s a simple install: run the application and choose the satellite you intend to view – in our case Astra 2 at 28.2 degrees for the Freesat transponders – and it imports some settings into the registry to enable the device as a fake DVB-T card, and remaps the satellite transponders to appears as DVB-T channel muxes.

After a reboot you can start Vista Media Centre and perform a channel scan on your new tuner using the Sky headend (usually at the end of the list of available sources).  By default this will result in over 200 channels, most of which you can’t view because they’re protected by Sky’s encryption technology.

It’s worth editing the registry to remove transponders that you know you won’t need such as the multiple regional BBC and ITV channels, all the encrypted channels, and the myriad shopping TV channels.  Each transponder is stored as a key in the registry under:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HCW88bda\DVBS_as_DVBT

In my case, I used the LyngSat information on the Astra 2D satellite to compare the frequency and channel list.  The dvbs_freq value in the registry represents the frequency listed in the leftmost column on the LyngSat page. For example removing the registry entry with the value of 10788000 will get rid of a load of Midlands and Yorkshire BBC channels.  Just delete the entire key that contains the value and when Vista scans for channels it will skip over that transponder.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HCW88bda\DVBS_as_DVBT\474000] ; #14
"dvbs_freq"=dword:A3B628 ; 10729000
"dvbs_polarity"=dword:2 ; 2
"dvbs_srate"=dword:55F0 ; 22000
"nit_onid"=dword:2 ; 2
"nit_tsid"=dword:7FA ; 2042
"nit_nid"=dword:0 ; 0
"DiSEqC_Port"=dword:1 ; 1

The only transponders I’ve left in are:

10729 (for E4, More4, Film4, Channel4)
10758 (for ITV2, CITV, ITV4, Men & Motors)
10773 (for CBBC, BBC3, BBC4, CBeebies, BBC2)
10818 (for BBC1 South)
10847 (for BBC HD)
10891 (for ITV1 South)

Until their contract expires with Sky, none of the Five network channels appear free to air.

Once you’ve scanned for channels you will end up with a somewhat unorthodox channel list.  You will need to rename some, and reorder and add channel listings to the rest.  You can do this via Settings->TV->Guide where you’ll find Change Channel Order, Edit Channels and Add Listings to Channel.  For example, by default Channel 4 appears as a channel named 5830.  You’ll need to rename this to Channel 4 and then add the guide listings for the appropriate channel.  Ordering channels is a real pain since you can’t just define channel numbers; you must labouriously move the channels up and down in the list.  Let’s hope that the Fuji update addresses this too.

Next post: the must have Vista Media Centre plugins for Movies and TV.

Categories: Hardware, HDTV, Software