Anyone here doing UK Sky with Omnikey card reader?

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mrphil

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Anyone here doing UK Sky with Omnikey card reader?

#1

Post by mrphil » Sat Sep 08, 2012 12:04 pm

Just ordered sky being installed in about a week, looks like a few people have started using the omnikey USB card reader in place of a Dreambox for reading the smart card. Anyone here been through the process and can share pointers/config?

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holidayboy

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#2

Post by holidayboy » Sat Sep 08, 2012 3:25 pm

I think that Tony Park is doing this, I haven't seen him around here lately though.......

You can maybe try avforums.com.
Rob.

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tony_park

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#3

Post by tony_park » Sun Sep 09, 2012 3:18 pm

holidayboy wrote:I think that Tony Park is doing this, I haven't seen him around here lately though.......

You can maybe try avforums.com.
haha, have been here, lurking... just not much to comment on :crazy:

I can summarise my testing of this card....

hit and miss...

the dreambox/technomate route is a lot more reliable, from my testing

I was encountering driver issues from resuming from sleep with the onmikey cardman 3121 that I was using. Quite often to get it working again, you had to unplug and re-insert - which is no good in my opinion for scheduled recordings, where you may not be around. The linux based boxes, may be a pain to get setup initially (or slightly different pain), but once they are set up, its literally fit and forget!

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#4

Post by bobbob » Sun Sep 09, 2012 5:07 pm

i'm back on the dreambox after using omnikey for a while. like tony i had a problem and in the end i didn't have time to work out what it was, had to go back to dreambox for waf. i will try again though because i'm keen to free up the feed

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#5

Post by mrphil » Sun Sep 09, 2012 6:42 pm

tony_park wrote:
I can summarise my testing of this card....

hit and miss...

the dreambox/technomate route is a lot more reliable, from my testing

I was encountering driver issues from resuming from sleep with the onmikey cardman 3121 that I was using. Quite often to get it working again, you had to unplug and re-insert - which is no good in my opinion for scheduled recordings, where you may not be around. The linux based boxes, may be a pain to get setup initially (or slightly different pain), but once they are set up, its literally fit and forget!
Was sleep the only issue? My htpc has run 24/7 for nearly 6 years. Sleep was always a problem for other hardware like USB tuners so I just stopped trying and everything was happy.

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#6

Post by tony_park » Mon Sep 10, 2012 7:34 am

Hi MrPhil,

I think the only issue was sleeping... or at least it was on a normal version of windows. I'm using a pc that comes with embedded windows currently, and we'd looked at using this tuner, but we couldn't get drivers to install correctly. I had mine on ebay a couple of weeks ago, think it went for about £10.... So it may be worth you trying it, and if you have problems, its not too big an outlay to loose.

HTH
Tony

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#7

Post by bobbob » Mon Sep 10, 2012 8:57 am

sleep wasn't the only issue for me

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#8

Post by tony_park » Mon Sep 10, 2012 10:32 am

bobbob wrote:sleep wasn't the only issue for me
care to elaborate? ;)

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#9

Post by bobbob » Mon Sep 10, 2012 11:12 am

it just crapped out while i was on holiday, no idea what it was as i say because when we got back i had to go back to the dreambox without being able to find out what the problem was. i never sleep.

i think once i saw windows reinstall the windows drivers for the card reader, as i say no idea what it was the second time round but after two days of trying to fix it and being asked why are we watching emmerdale on itvplayer i ditched it

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#10

Post by tony_park » Mon Sep 10, 2012 12:15 pm

Ok - sounds like fun!

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#11

Post by mrphil » Mon Sep 10, 2012 6:12 pm

Well the card reader was cheap on Amazon so it's not a big deal to give it a go. I'm coming from a low base anyway with WAF, our Virgin Media box is crashing regularly and is frequently claiming to not be subscribed to various channels, also to record Sky Movies via the stb I have to use an app I wrote which uses the channel change hook in WMC to type in the Virgin pin number which fails to work 1 in 20 or so times.

I'll post back once the Omnikey is up and running about how successful it s.

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#12

Post by holidayboy » Mon Sep 10, 2012 6:23 pm

I really need to get back up to speed with all of this, I'm a FreesatFromSky user with a dm500s clone that keeps my card entitlements up to date - I never have fixed Pick TV out though! (It was Sky 3 when I could last view it I think)!

Not enough hours in the day!!
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#13

Post by tony_park » Mon Sep 10, 2012 10:07 pm

holidayboy wrote:I really need to get back up to speed with all of this, I'm a FreesatFromSky user with a dm500s clone that keeps my card entitlements up to date - I never have fixed Pick TV out though! (It was Sky 3 when I could last view it I think)!

Not enough hours in the day!!
Hi,

I was told that pick tv is now fta, so you shouldn't need to do anything with oscam etc 8-)

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holidayboy

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#14

Post by holidayboy » Tue Sep 11, 2012 12:42 pm

Thanks Tony, I'll scan for it when I get some time. Probably nothing worth watching on it though :D
Rob.

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#15

Post by tony_park » Tue Sep 11, 2012 1:39 pm

How could you say that, I couldn't live without it :D

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#16

Post by CyberSimian » Tue Sep 11, 2012 3:03 pm

holidayboy wrote:Probably nothing worth watching on it though
Stargate Universe!

(Actually, I have not watched any of it yet, but I have been recording it; we are currently on series 2, I believe.)

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

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#17

Post by mrphil » Wed Sep 19, 2012 12:45 pm

Im setting this all up now. Omincard reader, Oscam, ACAMD, and DVBLogic TV Source 4.1. I've written a batch file to keep DVBLogic up to date with the Sky epg from the site at http://epg.whmcr.com/ but had to use TVSource 4.1 as the config files that site is generating doesnt seem to work with the latest version of 4.5.

All painless enough, decoded encrypted channels on the first test, so will see how it goes over the next couple of days.

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#18

Post by bobbob » Wed Sep 19, 2012 6:28 pm

but as far as i know updating the transponder file on its own doesn't cause dvblink to update anything. i believe you would need to rescan the transponder and then remove any redundant channels and update the sources with the new ones. its ones of my biggest bugbears tbh, replacing a channel with the same name and number doesn't seem to go smoothly for me. takes a couple of sync's. thankfully transponder changes are less frequent these days, i don't think i've had to do one since adding and then removing the olympic channels, before then possibly a channel 4 HD update a few months ago. i subscribe to the king of sat rss feed but unfortunately there's no way i can see to narrow it to 28.2E only

i stand to be corrected however

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#19

Post by mrphil » Thu Sep 20, 2012 8:53 pm

I'm not updating the transponder file, you have reminded me I need it add that as I had completely forgotten. What I'm downloading is a pre generated config XML for TVSource that contains all the Sky channels and restarting the dvblink service. No rescan necessary.

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#20

Post by tony_park » Fri Sep 21, 2012 10:10 am

To get a list of changes that have been made, I use: http://en.kingofsat.net/news28.2E.php

Don't forget when you download the new transponder file, to copy it into the transponder folder for each source, as well as the template folder...

I generally, just select the frequencies changed to rescan, and this then limits any changes that happen.

Tony

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