Introduction to DVB Adapter Tuning

Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) is a set of international open standards for digital television broadcasting. With Astra's DVB options, you can configure the reception of media content from various DVB networks, including satellite, cable, and terrestrial sources.

DVB Adapter

To receive DVB signals on a PC, you'll need additional hardware: a DVB Adapter. DVB Adapters are typically PCIe boards, although USB DVB Adapters are also available, albeit less popular.

DVB Adapter

Key components of a DVB adapter:

  • Tuner - also known as a frontend, this component receives the signal, converts analog to digital, and corrects errors
  • Demultiplexer - responsible for processing the received MPEG-TS stream and filtering individual streams
  • Common Interface (CI) - some adapters come with an interface to connect conditional access modules for stream descrambling

We recommend DVB adapters by:

Prepare you system

Before you begin, make sure that the DVB Adapter is connected to your server and that the appropriate Linux driver is installed:

General options

To create new adapter click "New Adapter" in the main menu.

DVB General Options

  • Enable - turn adapter on/off;
  • Name - adapter name;
  • ID - unique adapter identifier. For new adapter you may keep this field blank and Astra generates it;
  • Virtual - virtual adapters is custom interface to receive MPTS streams from different sources like SAT>IP, UDP, CI-Adapters;
  • SAT>IP - use adapter on remote server over SAT>IP protocol (deprecated, use Virtual - SAT>IP instead);
  • Adapter - select system devices;
  • Type - select adapter standard.

Advanced options

DVB Advanced Options

  • Enable monitoring - enable telemetry sending to Zabbix or InfluxDB;
  • Timeout - check DVR errors in defined interval. Default: 120;
  • CI - use external DVB-CI adapter like DigitalDevices DuoFlex CI or TBS 6900;
  • CI Device - device number on DVB-CI adapter;
  • CI Bitrate - define bitrate for DVB-CI adapter;
  • BISS - descramble an entire transponder;
  • DVB API v3 - use deprecated API to read information from Adapter;
  • Budget Mode - disable hardware PID filtering. In budget mode Astra receives whole transponder from adapter;
  • CA Delay - delay between sending control packets to Conditional Access Module (CAM).

DVB Type

Other options depends of the selected adapter type:

Scan

Once your adapter is configured, you can check the signal quality and scan it for available channels. Read more: Scan DVB Adapter

Troubleshooting

If you have any issues with starting DVB adapter please check our guide: Troubleshooting DVB receiving