The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> a PI 3 plus SD card, DVB s2 usb dongle

I've used various DVB-S/DVB-T cards over the years, some have the
tuner/demodulator chips 'direct' on the PCI bus, others 'hide' them
behind a PCI->USB bridge, so they're effectively dongles on a card,
obviously if it's an actual dongle it must be USB.

The disadvantage I find with both of the USB approaches is that they
tend not to have hardware PID filtering, so the CPU has to process the
full ~40 Mbps transport stream and filter out the one or two it's
interested in viewing/recording in software.  So you get high levels of
interrupts and context switches, I don't know if a Pi copes well with
that or not?

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05