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Max # of DVB devices supported under Linux for streaming

Posted: 20 Mar 2009 09:47
by tkernen
Apologies if this is documented somewhere, but I couldn't find it in any of the documentation I browsed.

What is the maximum number of supported DVB devices in a single machine under Linux that can then resource and stream the Transport Streams? Ie: Can I have a mix of 5 (or more) DVB devices in use in parallel tuned to different sources and restream them. I somewhat recall a limit of 4 devices in the past but that was many many moons ago.

Re: Max # of DVB devices supported under Linux for streaming

Posted: 20 Mar 2009 12:03
by rh
i think this isnt a problem of vlc because vlc use the device (for instance /dev/dvb/adapter0) to communicate with your dvb device. but on my oppinion its not a good idea to have more than 2 dvb cards in your system. everything of datastream must be trough the pci bus and worked up with all components, esp. harddisk, cpu and so on. i think you can realize a good working system with 2 cards - this also works here very well.

Re: Max # of DVB devices supported under Linux for streaming

Posted: 20 Mar 2009 14:19
by tkernen
i think this isnt a problem of vlc because vlc use the device (for instance /dev/dvb/adapter0) to communicate with your dvb device. but on my oppinion its not a good idea to have more than 2 dvb cards in your system. everything of datastream must be trough the pci bus and worked up with all components, esp. harddisk, cpu and so on. i think you can realize a good working system with 2 cards - this also works here very well.
Not sure I agree (or we might not be talking about the same thing). All I plan on doing is to tune to a different source for each card and output the whole TS as a multicast stream. Last time I did build such a setup on a dedicated server, I had 3 cards in it and it worked fine, if I exclude memory issues in the long run and had to restart the processes periodically.

As you referring to the same setup or were you considering specific processing (ie: record to file, transcode, etc..)?

Re: Max # of DVB devices supported under Linux for streaming

Posted: 22 Mar 2009 10:38
by rh
aahh ok, misunderstood a little and right understood a little ... :wink:

In my opinion you can only select different sources if you receive tv from dvb-t because there are a couplet of senders in one frequency area. You can recognize this in your channels.conf from kaffeine or vdr. With vlc you can work in this case with the PID in your streaming chain.